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News About Tech, Money and InnovationSat, 10 Dec 2016 02:07:24 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.178053529Copyright 2016, VentureBeatVentureBeathttp://vbstatic.co/brand/img/logos/VB_Extended_Logo_40H.pnghttp://venturebeat.com
25040Venturebeat.comOne huge iPhone vs. Android mobile shopping difference no one is talking abouthttp://venturebeat.com/2016/12/02/one-huge-iphone-vs-android-mobile-shopping-difference-no-one-is-talking-about/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/02/one-huge-iphone-vs-android-mobile-shopping-difference-no-one-is-talking-about/#respondFri, 02 Dec 2016 09:55:10 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2120553ANALYSIS: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in the rearview mirror. And whether you #optedoutside or joined the barbarian invasions of Walmarts and Best Buys around the country, it was a record holiday. Especially for mobile retailers targeting iPhone users. According to Adobe, Friday set a record for U.S. digital sales at $3.34 billion, which was promptly […]
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ANALYSIS:

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in the rearview mirror. And whether you #optedoutside or joined the barbarian invasions of Walmarts and Best Buys around the country, it was a record holiday.

Especially for mobile retailers targeting iPhone users.

According to Adobe, Friday set a record for U.S. digital sales at $3.34 billion, which was promptly smashed by Monday at $3.4 billion. Both also set records for mobile commerce, with 33 percent growth on Friday and 34 percent on Monday.

Above: Top shopping apps on Google Play

What’s most interesting to me, however, is a key difference between iOS and Android users in the area of bricks versus clicks: IRL shopping as opposed to digital commerce, specifically, mobile commerce.

When you go shopping in meatspace, you might need maps and directions. When you go shopping digitally, you don’t.

On Black Friday, Android owners opened maps and navigation apps 26.5 percent more often than they did on average over the preceding 21 Fridays. On Cyber Monday, Android owners checked navigation apps 37 percent more. (Again, more than the average of the preceding 21 Mondays.) iPhone owners, however, showed opposite behavior. On Black Friday, they opened mapping apps 15 percent less than usual. On Monday, they checked for digital directions 12 percent less than normal.

This is data based on TUNE‘s mobile marketing platform, which measures data for thousands of marketers on over 2.2 billion devices globally. (Full disclosure: I work for TUNE.)

We don’t see huge differences in other key areas, like dating (both iPhone and Android users dated a little bit more over the holidays), or news (massively up on both major mobile platforms over the weekend) or photography, social, business, or productivity apps.

But we do see this one key distinction.

It’s not clear based on this data alone exactly what results retailers can expect from customers on the different platforms. Adobe does indicate that iPhone owners did tend to spend more, per order, over the weekend — a trend that has been true for a long time. More study may reveal more detail over time.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/02/one-huge-iphone-vs-android-mobile-shopping-difference-no-one-is-talking-about/feed/02120553One huge iPhone vs. Android mobile shopping difference no one is talking aboutAngry Birds maker Rovio spins off Hatch, a subscription video game streaming service for mobilehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/30/angry-birds-maker-rovio-spins-off-hatch-a-subscription-video-game-streaming-service-for-mobile/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/30/angry-birds-maker-rovio-spins-off-hatch-a-subscription-video-game-streaming-service-for-mobile/#respondWed, 30 Nov 2016 12:00:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2119093Finland’s Rovio announced today that it has created a new company called Hatch Entertainment that is developing a Spotify-like service for mobile video games. Hatch Entertainment has been officially spun off to continue developing the subscription-based service. Officials from Hatch said the company is going to begin an invite-only soft launch for select Android users […]
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Finland’s Rovio announced today that it has created a new company called Hatch Entertainment that is developing a Spotify-like service for mobile video games.

Hatch Entertainment has been officially spun off to continue developing the subscription-based service. Officials from Hatch said the company is going to begin an invite-only soft launch for select Android users early next year as it continues to refine the service, attract new partners, and set an actual subscription price.

“The word ‘Hatch’ stands for a fresh beginning, a totally new era in mobile gaming,” said Vesa Jutila, Hatch’s head of content. “Hatch will be the only place where you can play, watch, and share your favorite games.”

The spinoff of Hatch was announced at Slush, the tech conference taking place this week in Helsinki, Finland. Rovio has been one of country’s big startup successes, thanks to Angry Birds, though over the past couple of years, the company has struggled to respond to slowing revenue from the game.

Rovio had been developing the Hatch service but decided it needed to be completely independent to successfully attract a wide range of game developers, Jutila said. Rovio remains a shareholder, but is not disclosing the size of its ownership stake.

In an overview prior to the announcement, Jutila walked reporters through Hatch’s functions, which combine aspects of Twitch, Netflix, Spotify, and Facebook. The company is hoping that Hatch will do nothing less than reinvent the way people buy and experience mobile video games.

Above: Vesa Jutila, head of content for Hatch.

When someone downloads the app, they will experience it as a free-to-play, ad-supported service, with an option to go ad-free through a subscription. Rather than downloading games to a phone, games are streamed through the app. Hatch believes it has created a back-end cloud infrastructure that is robust enough for people to play the games with no latency.

Inside the app, users will be able to choose from 100 games offered by the initial 40 partners, who include BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment America, TAITO Corporation, Ubisoft Mobile, ustwo Games, and Double Fine Productions.

Among the more intriguing features is the ability to instantly invite others to share the gameplay with you, turning any single-player game into a multi-player game. Two people streaming the same game at the same time can both control the gameplay from their device.

Players can also tap a button and start streaming their gameplay for others to watch, a kind of mobile version of Amazon’s Twitch. And then they can clip gameplay moments to share on other social networks.

The centerpiece of the app is a feed that lets users see what games their friends have been playing, or what clips they have shared from their games. Hatch hopes this will be a powerful game discovery function that will complement its own recommendation engine.

Hatch is still working out the details, but it will share revenue from the app with developers based on how much time users spend playing that company’s games.

And Hatch is hoping to add more partners before the soft launch next year. The company is also creating an investment fund to develop games that it hopes will be better able to take advantage of the social and multi-player functions of the service.

“We believe Hatch will launch a social revolution in mobile gaming,” Jutila said. “We have kind of lost that social aspect of gaming. We are going to bring the fun back to the games.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/30/angry-birds-maker-rovio-spins-off-hatch-a-subscription-video-game-streaming-service-for-mobile/feed/02119093Angry Birds maker Rovio spins off Hatch, a subscription video game streaming service for mobileSeth Besmertnik, being brutally original, and making Spectacles of yourselves – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/22/seth-besmertnik-being-brutally-original-and-making-spectacles-of-yourselves-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/22/seth-besmertnik-being-brutally-original-and-making-spectacles-of-yourselves-vb-engage/#respondTue, 22 Nov 2016 17:21:31 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2113699This week, Travis and Stewart talk with Seth Besmertnik about content marketing, SEO, mobile engagement, how to make sure the output you create is actually seen, and what to do to ensure your potential customers actually care about you. And in this week’s news we discuss the latest and greatest in VR, plus we talk […]
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This week, Travis and Stewart talk with Seth Besmertnik about content marketing, SEO, mobile engagement, how to make sure the output you create is actually seen, and what to do to ensure your potential customers actually care about you.

And in this week’s news we discuss the latest and greatest in VR, plus we talk about what’s going on with Snap Inc Spectacles, a wearable that interacts with Snapchat to provide a less geeky Google Glass-like experience. Want a pair? Turns out there isn’t an easy way to get ahold of them right now, but that’s part of the fun, right?

Make progress toward answering questions that your products are solutions for [32:03]

Understand needs of customer, be strategic, and make focused content [32:52]

Thanks for tuning in this week, and be excited for next week, when we begin our Web Summit interview series, starting with the incredible CEO of Imgur, Alan Schaaf.

And if you missed last week’s episode with Veronica Belmont of Growbot, an incredible episode full of massive knowledge bombs, listen to it right here.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/22/seth-besmertnik-being-brutally-original-and-making-spectacles-of-yourselves-vb-engage/feed/02113699Seth Besmertnik, being brutally original, and making Spectacles of yourselves – VB Engage\n Alexis Fogel, Hillary’s emails, and telling the truth at all times – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/alexis-fogel-hillarys-emails-and-telling-the-truth-at-all-times-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/alexis-fogel-hillarys-emails-and-telling-the-truth-at-all-times-vb-engage/#respondTue, 08 Nov 2016 16:56:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2102595This week, Travis and Stewart discuss Hillary Clinton’s biggest email mistakes. No, not those emails, but the thousands she sends to her supporters every day. Being fair-minded, we also talk about Donald Trump’s emails. Thanks to new research on both candidates’ email practices, we highlight three “yuge” email marketing lessons for your business. We also […]
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This week, Travis and Stewart discuss Hillary Clinton’s biggest email mistakes. No, not those emails, but the thousands she sends to her supporters every day. Being fair-minded, we also talk about Donald Trump’s emails. Thanks to new research on both candidates’ email practices, we highlight three “yuge” email marketing lessons for your business.

We also interview Alexis Fogel of Dashlane, who explains how the security app managed to grow so quickly, and why being transparent helps with trust, engagement, and community management — something politicians could learn a thing or two about, no doubt.

Travis was global digital strategist for Symantec for Norton when security marketing was fear-based [28:57]

Adding value and showcasing value instead of fear [29:47]

Stewart makes a joke about passwords (it is funny, honestly) [31:44]

Thanks for tuning in this week, and be excited for next week when we interview the incredible Veronica Belmont.

And if you missed last week’s episode with Matt Asay of Adobe, which was an incredible episode full of massive knowledge bombs, listen to it right here.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/08/alexis-fogel-hillarys-emails-and-telling-the-truth-at-all-times-vb-engage/feed/02102595Alexis Fogel, Hillary’s emails, and telling the truth at all times – VB Engage\n Gaming the system: Why you need to get your mobile users competinghttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/07/gaming-the-system-why-you-need-to-get-your-mobile-users-competing/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/07/gaming-the-system-why-you-need-to-get-your-mobile-users-competing/#respondMon, 07 Nov 2016 11:55:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2099721GUEST: When a new app publishes, it has to overcome the challenge of discoverability. In the iOS ecosystem alone, there are around two million different apps available in the App Store on any given day. And there’s a reason for this high volume: Apps are pretty lucrative, with total app revenues projected to top $75 billion […]
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GUEST:

When a new app publishes, it has to overcome the challenge of discoverability. In the iOS ecosystem alone, there are around two million different apps available in the App Store on any given day. And there’s a reason for this high volume: Apps are pretty lucrative, with total app revenues projected to top $75 billion by next year.

Relatively low barriers to entry allow for the possibility of being quickly discovered and earning coveted ad revenue. Consider the colossal success this year of Pokémon GO, which sent Nintendo’s stock skyrocketing on the back of 30 million daily active users at peak popularity. But if you don’t have Pikachu to hook nostalgic millennials, standing out can be tough. After all, more than 10,000 games are submitted for consideration to the iTunes App Store every single month.

Even narrowing it down to a single category doesn’t make the environment any less competitive; there are, for instance, more than 165,000 fitness apps in the App Store. So if you’re a marketer tasked with driving downloads for your run tracker app (which, like most options, is probably free to download and can’t rely on classic marketing levers like price) how do you hit your goals?

Enter mobile rewards marketing. The concept really began with incent, born out of the need to get apps discovered. Being found was the key driver of success when apps first became popular. The more downloads you have, the higher you rise in the ranks, and the more successful your app is considered. Incentivizing downloads and running a “burst” campaign became – and still is – a popular and extremely effective way to drive app discoverability, boost initial engagement, and increase organic installs.

As the app ecosystem evolved and matured, rewards marketing did, too. Marketers began leveraging rewards to solve not just the problem of discoverability, but to address the challenges around engagement as well.

Sports, gaming, and the spirit of competition

This desire to use rewards to improve engagement eventually led marketers to in-app competitions. Users who join competitions send a strong signal to marketers about their motivations. Smart marketers use this motivation to reinforce desired behavior and create repeatable habits within the app.

Competition brings out the best in us. While this platitude has been recited by everyone from athletes to economists, it remains not only true but relevant even to fields like marketing. Marketers would be remiss to overlook the psychology behind competition. Just as rewards — monetary and otherwise — have the power to drive a desired action, competition has the power to unlock a more intrinsic motivation in users. Studies have found that most people who play sports do so because the game itself is its own reward.

When we think of competition as a motivator, most of us will jump to athletics. Professional athletes are incentivized to perform by obscenely large paychecks, but most would agree that their willingness to participate in an often grueling, potentially dangerous competition stems from more deeply held psychological factors, rather than behavioral conditioning.

Thanks to technology, the genetically gifted aren’t the only ones who can play games professionally or satisfy that urge to compete. eSports, the soon-to-be nearly billion-dollar industry, now connects video game players across the globe by hosting competitive gaming tournaments. From Call of Duty to Madden, the best gamers can compete for prizes in competitions that are streamed to thousands of live viewers, just like any other professional sport. According to market intelligence firm Newzoo, more than 89 million people spend over 3.7 billion hours watching eSports every year. Deloitte has reported that more than 40,000 individuals attend live events, with tens of millions tuning in to watch online. More people will probably watch the upcoming Halo tournaments than did the last Cubs-Indians World Series game.

The app opportunity

Marketers are now realizing that it’s not just the Counter-Strikes and League of Legends of the world that are appropriate for a little friendly competition. Casual, mobile games are also looking to eSports to drive engagement. Take Doodle Jump, the wildly popular multiplayer game that announced its own eSports league this summer. Brands are increasingly bringing the fun of the massive eSports craze to the consumer, so they aren’t fighting against ads but instead participating in an immersive experience that ties right into the game. Anyone who has had to sidestep Pokémon GO players walking down the street realizes just how immersive competition can be. While all games can’t take advantage of augmented reality, embedding real competition — challenges for badges, recognition as a top player, etc. — is part of what made the game so difficult to put down, even in traffic. In fact, the first person to catch ‘em all was rewarded for their prowess with free trips across the globe from Marriott and Expedia — a real (expensive) prize for competing in a virtual world.

The secret is moving that spirit of competition and enthusiasm to the mobile world — before the consumer clicks through what is perceived as an intrusion.

Playing to win the game

Psychology has gone hand in hand with marketing since the ad men on Madison Avenue realized the power of pulling behavioral levers to incentivize a particular action. Before De Beers equated devotion and self-worth to gemstones through clever ad copy in the 1940s, there was no market for diamond engagement rings.

Today, marketers should focus less on spinning a product and more on how to align their goals with the behaviors that their customers already are engaging in. Basic rules of economics describe both incentives and competition as essential forces in driving an outcome. Marketers would do well to take some cues from economists and get their customers competing. The possibilities are endless. Imagine a tournament-driven McDonald’s Monopoly game on the phone, driving hundreds of thousands of users to the app each day to compete against each other for rewards. Or consider an annual international Candy Crush tournament that doles out huge prizes to competitors. MapMyRun, a fitness app that uses GPS and location tracking to log your run, already uses coupons as a reward for achieving certain goals, but one could imagine that runners would be even more likely to use the app if they had a chance to compete against friends and strangers. Maybe introducing a virtual 5K race, for example, where each user runs his or her own unique 3.1-mile course with the app tracking times — and rewarding the top finishers — could inspire more sustained engagement with the app.

Just as marketing evolved along with mobile technology to solve the problem of discoverability in an oversaturated market, it is now evolving to address the need for engagement. By aligning with the natural preferences, motivations, and even instincts of consumers, apps have a fighting chance of becoming the next big thing. Intrusion and obstruction will only serve to repel users, so it’s imperative that app marketers create an experience that feels intuitive, unobtrusive, and fun. Marketers who recognize that the tide is turning and invest accordingly are sure to stand out from the competition.

Spencer Scott is the CEO and founder of Meed, a mobile rewards platform dedicated to helping brands grow and engage their audiences and acquire high-quality users. Having spent more than 20 years in tech, he has helped app marketers drive hundreds of thousands of installs and led teams that drove more unique U.S. traffic than any other incentivized ad network. An active advisory board member of Yesware, he has also served on the board of companies acquired by Facebook and Groupon. He is considered a prominent thought leader in the ad tech space, having spoken at events including Digiday, ad:tech, Casual Connect and more. Spencer previously served as the CEO of FreeMyApps, the world’s largest mobile app and game discovery network, which will continue to operate as a Meed offering.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/07/gaming-the-system-why-you-need-to-get-your-mobile-users-competing/feed/02099721Gaming the system: Why you need to get your mobile users competing4 best practices your mobile messaging campaign needs to followhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/03/4-best-practices-your-mobile-messaging-campaign-needs-to-follow/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/03/4-best-practices-your-mobile-messaging-campaign-needs-to-follow/#respondFri, 04 Nov 2016 01:10:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2097558GUEST: In a recent VentureBeat article, I talked about how chatbots and mobile messaging will become increasingly more accessible. At the moment, it may seem like only well-resourced corporations can take advantage of this technology, but we are already seeing small businesses setting up auto-responders and messaging campaigns delivered through the major messaging apps. With this in […]
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1. Keep the messages simple

Our first mobile messaging best practice is to keep things simple. When moving from email marketing to mobile messaging, you may bring some (bad) habits with you. Mobile messaging isn’t email. You do not need lots of words, multiple touch points, fancy creatives, excessive politeness, or anything else you would consider normal for email. Mobile messaging is about getting to the point. Your customers do not have time to read (millennials now read less than the average person). More importantly, messaging apps are not designed for large amounts of words.

Think of the way you interact with your friends through these apps. You probably use short sentences with multiple messages sent in quick succession. It makes it easier for your business. Imagine the time you spend crafting beautiful words, lovely images, and well-crafted sentences in your emails. All of that can be forgotten. Focus on the message you want your readers to read and the action you want them to take; that’s it.

2. Explain how to opt out

Much like with email, your customers need to be able to opt out. This is more than just a nice thing to do — it is a legal requirement. Ensure you notify anyone on your list how to unsubscribe. Sometimes the process might be as simple as sending an opt-out keyword (“STOP,” for example).

3. Be personal and respectful

Mobile phones are hugely valuable to people. We have everything in them, from personal contacts to photos of the people we cherish. You need to keep this in mind whenever you send messages. Make sure you talk to your subscribers on a personal level, because mobile messaging is all about one-to-one conversation. Don’t invade their personal space. Keep message frequency low and, if possible, at their request. A good example is to set up buttons your subscribers can interact with. You are not actively broadcasting your content; you are offering them a way to keep engaging with you.

4. Start small

It’s easy to get excited by the opportunity mobile messaging offers. You could start by setting up an autoresponder on Facebook Messenger and 2 hours later have 19 campaigns, buttons after each message, call-to-actions, download links, one-click call-to-support teams, and so on. Take a deep breath. Your customers do want to talk to you through messaging apps, but there is a high chance they would feel lost in all the campaigns and interactions.

Start small and focus on a few (two or three) goals. Is it to enable your customers to opt in for content updates? Offer them a simple keyword opt-in. Is it to give your clients a centralized place to find your social media accounts? Deliver a simple autoresponder with all the links.

Once you’re up and running, you can start implementing more options and creating more complex campaigns over time.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/03/4-best-practices-your-mobile-messaging-campaign-needs-to-follow/feed/020975584 best practices your mobile messaging campaign needs to followUrban Airship launches two messaging APIs, support for Apple News notificationshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/urban-airship-launches-two-messaging-apis-support-for-apple-news-notifications/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/urban-airship-launches-two-messaging-apis-support-for-apple-news-notifications/#respondWed, 02 Nov 2016 13:00:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2097408As new devices are added to the digital soup every day — from smartphones to home automation, connected cars to virtual reality — the process of delivering significant customer messages at the right time, on the right platform, is becoming more sophisticated than ever. And the rewards are there. A recent study showed that triggered […]
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As new devices are added to the digital soup every day — from smartphones to home automation, connected cars to virtual reality — the process of delivering significant customer messages at the right time, on the right platform, is becoming more sophisticated than ever.

And the rewards are there. A recent study showed that triggered push notifications perform a staggering 2,770 percent better than “batch and blast” messages.

Today, Urban Airship has announced the launch of Open Channels and Open Profiles, two new APIs that are designed to help solve this problem.

The new APIs allow for personalized messaging to any platform, device, or marketing channel and integrate with real-time customer data from any system. I’ve seen both Open Channels and Open Profiles in action.

Here’s an example of how it might work.

Imagine sending a customer a web push notification via their browser in the morning — the device we know they’re using at that time of day. In the example I saw, it was a message to buy tickets for a local basketball game. Later that day, we know the same person is using their smartphone, so a message offering a unique fan experience is pushed, and a ticket is made available immediately (in this case, added to Apple Wallet for easy retrieval). Before the game, changes to the roster are pushed to Facebook Messenger, because we know the user is often in that app at that time.

The APIs are underpinned by the Urban Airship platform, which sends over 1 billion app notifications and collects 10 billion user attributes every day. It is this device and usage data that provides the basis for highly personalized messaging. The new APIs allow developers and marketers to coordinate lightweight notifications and integrate them into any experience.

In addition to the API announcements, Urban Airship has announced support for Apple News notifications — making it the first platform to do so. Apple News notifications are one of the news-oriented features added in iOS 10, and allow Apple users to receive notifications from major publications. The feature also adds support for web notifications and uses machine learning to help predict app users who are likely to churn.

These new capabilities mean that developers and marketers don’t have to support multiple messaging platforms or build orchestration logic from scratch to reach customers with notification-style messages on any channel. And by collecting and processing real-time customer behavior, events, and attributes from any system or channel, companies can enrich user profiles in real time.

These new capabilities are also available in Urban Airship’s Insight solution, which analyzes customer patterns across multi-device, multi-touchpoint journeys, and via Urban Airship Connect, which provides real-time streaming for populating data warehouses and triggering user-level actions in other systems.

Open Channels, Open Profiles, and integration with Apple News notifications are available to Urban Airship customers from today.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/urban-airship-launches-two-messaging-apis-support-for-apple-news-notifications/feed/02097408Urban Airship launches two messaging APIs, support for Apple News notificationsMatt Asay, mobile horror stories, and what’s next for Twitter – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/matt-asay-mobile-horror-stories-and-whats-next-for-twitter-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/matt-asay-mobile-horror-stories-and-whats-next-for-twitter-vb-engage/#respondTue, 01 Nov 2016 15:36:12 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2096512This week, Travis and Stewart are celebrating their sixth month of being partners in crime on VB Engage. That means this is episode 26, for the mathematicians out there. In this episode, we interview Matt Asay, VP of mobile at Adobe Marketing Cloud. Asay (pronounced Ace-E), tells us a few horror stories about how some […]
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This week, Travis and Stewart are celebrating their sixth month of being partners in crime on VB Engage. That means this is episode 26, for the mathematicians out there.

In this episode, we interview Matt Asay, VP of mobile at Adobe Marketing Cloud. Asay (pronounced Ace-E), tells us a few horror stories about how some mobile app and game developers have complicated their marketing stacks beyond belief, and how hard it is for web-focused businesses to make the move to mobile. We like horror stories, especially during Halloween week!

We also discuss Twitter’s latest news, including its earnings and user growth, and what this means for social advertising. Finally, we find out — thanks to Adobe’s annual online sales predictions report, which is always spookily accurate — exactly what this holiday season holds for retail marketers.

Also this week, our “hero image” features our second guest illustrator (her Fiverr name is MakeMeBark.)

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/01/matt-asay-mobile-horror-stories-and-whats-next-for-twitter-vb-engage/feed/02096512Matt Asay, mobile horror stories, and what’s next for Twitter – VB Engage\n Sensor Tower: Pokémon Go’s Halloween treat helps it reclaim No. 1 top-grossing spothttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/sensor-tower-pokemon-gos-halloween-treat-helps-it-reclaim-no-1-top-grossing-spot/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/sensor-tower-pokemon-gos-halloween-treat-helps-it-reclaim-no-1-top-grossing-spot/#respondThu, 27 Oct 2016 21:10:39 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2092755One of the biggest games of the year is embracing seasonal events to get players excited all over again. Pokémon Go is back on top of the iPhone top-grossing charts in the United States after falling as low No. 10 last week, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Developer Niantic updated the location-based augmented reality […]
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One of the biggest games of the year is embracing seasonal events to get players excited all over again.

Pokémon Go is back on top of the iPhone top-grossing charts in the United States after falling as low No. 10 last week, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Developer Niantic updated the location-based augmented reality app that puts digital monsters into the real world with you using your smartphone’s camera earlier this week to celebrate Halloween. It now awards players with more candy to upgrade their collectible creatures, and more ghosts and other spooky Pokémon are out on the streets than usual.

Pokémon Go Halloween began Tuesday, and it will run through the first day of November. And it is one of the key reasons the game is back at the top of the $36.6 billion mobile gaming business.

Pikachu is back!

What’s notable about the Halloween event is that it doesn’t include any new content. Instead, Niantic was able to engage lapsed fans with a simple remix of resources that are already inside of Pokémon Go. This suggests that the company could continue doing events like these without having to invest heavily in building totally fresh content. And when Niantic does introduce new monsters and assets, it should have an even bigger effect than this week’s event.

Pokémon Go was also the top-grossing mobile game worldwide in September, according to a report from SuperData Research. That ranking is in jeopardy if it continues to fall behind games like Mobile Strike and Game of War, but it is still making quite a lot of money as long as it’s in the top 10.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/sensor-tower-pokemon-gos-halloween-treat-helps-it-reclaim-no-1-top-grossing-spot/feed/02092755Sensor Tower: Pokémon Go’s Halloween treat helps it reclaim No. 1 top-grossing spotImgur’s Alan Schaaf will speak fluent ‘geek’ with VB Engage at Web Summithttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/imgurs-alan-schaaf-will-speak-fluent-geek-with-vb-engage-at-web-summit/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/imgurs-alan-schaaf-will-speak-fluent-geek-with-vb-engage-at-web-summit/#respondThu, 27 Oct 2016 16:25:48 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2091322VB Engage — VentureBeat’s brutally honest marketing podcast — is going “live” on stage at Web Summit for the very first time in November, and our guest of honor will be none other than Alan Schaaf, CEO and cofounder of the phenom that is Imgur. For those that don’t know (and we’re sure that’s around just two or […]
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VB Engage — VentureBeat’s brutally honest marketing podcast — is going “live” on stage at Web Summit for the very first time in November, and our guest of honor will be none other than Alan Schaaf, CEO and cofounder of the phenom that is Imgur.

For those that don’t know (and we’re sure that’s around just two or three of you), Web Summit is the gargantuan tech event that sees more than 50,000 tech CEOs, founders, startups, investors, and political leaders coming together in Portugal.

Web Summit is one of the fastest-growing tech events in the world. It originally started life in Dublin before outgrowing its hometown and moving to Lisbon. In part, it is the use of marketing technology and data science that helped with this massive growth, a topic we love to cover with honesty and humor throughout VB Engage.

And for the first time, we’ll be recording the podcast live on stage to an audience of 1,000 attendees. As well as covering the weekly mobile and marketing engagement news, Travis Wright and Stewart Rogers will welcome Alan Schaaf to the stage to discuss the rise of geek culture and what it means for brands.

Above: Alan Schaaf, Imgur

After all, the world is getting geekier. Once-niche topics like superheroes, dragons, and video games are now mainstream obsessions. The driving force behind this cultural shift? Millennials who are proud of their geekdom, and who create and share viral content, something Imgur has played a fundamental part in facilitating.

So what do we mean by “geek culture,” and how does that group differ from other “digital native” and millennial sub-groups?

“First of all, I think it’s interesting to know that being a geek isn’t the negative thing that it used to be,” Schaaf told us. “For millennials, being a geek is a positive thing, and we see people proudly self-identifying themselves as geeks. Geek culture is all about being super passionate about your interests and not afraid to express them, even if your interests are unpopular.”

And Schaaf has the data to back that up, a topic we’ll be diving into in more depth during the live podcast.

“We partnered up with research firm YPulse to learn more about geek culture and its demographics, and we found that 60 percent of millennials qualify as ‘geeks,’ and that 23 percent are self-proclaimed ‘hardcore geeks.’ That means more than 50 million U.S. millennials are geeks! This is a huge segment of the broader millennial generation that we can’t ignore.”

During Web Summit, we’ll talk with Schaaf about how geeks stand out from other cohorts of millennials, how their passions can be embraced by brands for mutual benefit, and what their affinities are. With VB Engage, we’re always trying to tell the story of how we sell and market to the “new communities” that exist in an always-mobile world, and Schaaf’s insights help to tell that story for a significant percentage of today’s consumer audience.

We’ll also discuss how Imgur has evolved since its inception to engage with, and build a community from, that audience.

“In many ways, products are a reflection of their founders, and I consider myself a geek,” Schaaf said. “But aside from that, Imgur just organically evolved into the epicenter of geek culture. I didn’t design Imgur to be any specific type of community. I built Imgur based on what Imgur’s users (who call themselves ‘Imgurians’) told me they wanted. What you see on Imgur today isn’t the result of product managers deciding what features we should provide, it’s the result of Imgurians telling us what they want Imgur to be, and then we built that for them.”

Web Summit features 21 distinct conferences under one umbrella, each focused on the impact the tech industry is having on our daily lives running through the core. VB Engage is coming live from the ContentMakers stage, a space that asks how will we consume and create content in ten years’, five years’, or even a year’s time. Schaaf is obviously looking forward to the experience.

“It’s my first time at Web Summit, and I’m super excited about all of the inspiring people and companies that are coming together,” Schaaf said. “Really just looking forward to getting immersed in it and having the full experience.”

VB Engage with Alan Schaaf will be on the ContentMakers stage at 1:15 p.m. Western European Time on November 9, and the episode will be available via the VB Engage podcast landing page, iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, and all other good (and some bad) podcast platforms soon after. VB Engage is available every Tuesday.

Listen, subscribe to, and rate VB Engage:

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/imgurs-alan-schaaf-will-speak-fluent-geek-with-vb-engage-at-web-summit/feed/02091322Imgur’s Alan Schaaf will speak fluent ‘geek’ with VB Engage at Web Summit\n Adobe predictions show only 5% of shoppers will drive 35% of online saleshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/adobe-predictions-show-only-5-of-shoppers-will-drive-35-of-online-sales/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/adobe-predictions-show-only-5-of-shoppers-will-drive-35-of-online-sales/#respondThu, 27 Oct 2016 10:00:59 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2091284Adobe has today released its 2016 Digital Insights Shopping Predictions for the upcoming holiday season, and while the data shows some outstanding growth in online sales, one statistic shows just how fragile the market is. Adobe has an extensive data pool that has allowed it to predict consumer spending accurately. In fact, the company has […]
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Adobe has today released its 2016 Digital Insights Shopping Predictions for the upcoming holiday season, and while the data shows some outstanding growth in online sales, one statistic shows just how fragile the market is.

Adobe has an extensive data pool that has allowed it to predict consumer spending accurately. In fact, the company has been within two percent of the actual results over the past two years, making Adobe’s predictions among the most accurate in the industry.

Before we get to the most surprising part of the study, let’s take a look at the headlines.

Adobe expects an extended holiday season with consumers shopping earlier and later in the season than usual. It expects that over 53 consecutive days (57 calendar days in total), online sales will exceed $1 billion. That is in contrast to last year, where the season lasted 31 consecutive days.

Cyber Monday is expected to be the largest online shopping day of all time, generating $3.36 billion in sales. That is equivalent to 9.4 percent growth on 2015. And sales on Thanksgiving Day will increase 15.6 percent year-over-year (YoY) to $2 billion, although Adobe expects it will not reach the 25 percent YoY increase of 2015. Black Friday is predicted to grow 11.3 percent YoY to $3.05 billion.

But the data-point that grabs all the attention is the percentage of shoppers that drive online sales, and the sizeable piece of the American apple pie they control.

“The most surprising results include the fact that 5 percent of customers drive 35 percent of overall revenue for the average retailer,” Becky Tasker, managing analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, told me. “Imagine if this number decreased to 4 percent and the potential revenue impact it could have on a retailer.”

Tasker is right. A small swing in the online sales drivers would cause a massive shift in the $38.5 billion attributed to ecommerce and would affect smaller retailers immensely.

That isn’t the only surprising result. Mobile will overtake desktop for the first time as the device of choice for online sales, but it turns out that conversions are falling short.

Poor mobile shopping experiences will only drive 34 percent of sales, a 19 percent gap between visits and purchases. That isn’t surprising considering the poor customer satisfaction across the majority of retail apps, most of which are failing their users.

“In terms of mobile, we specifically looked at smartphone versus desktop performance in terms of conversion (sales) rates, cart conversion rates, and average order value (AOV),” Tasker said. “We see several indications as to why smartphones lag. First, conversion on a desktop is 2.7X higher than a smartphone. Second, we actually see that once a consumer reaches the cart page on a desktop, nearly 30 percent of those carts turn into an actual order, compared to just 19 percent of carts on smartphones.”

While many conclusions can be drawn from this report, and others that point to issues with the mobile purchasing experience, two points of interest stand out immediately.

“There is an inherent challenge with getting customers to purchase on a smartphone: Therefore, mobile optimization and cross-device experiences should be considered,” Tasker said. “And customers are currently spending less on a smartphone, so retailers need to determine strategies to increase the amount of spend.”

Tasker believes that loyalty can play a big part here.

“We looked at the consumer behavior of price matching across retailers to determine how many products were bought at a lower price, the same price, or a higher price in the holiday season,” Tasker said. “While we do see the amount of products purchased at a lower price increases to 41 percent during the holiday season, we also see a consistent 25 percent of products being bought at a higher price. This indicates that customers are willing to pay a higher price for some products, and are likely doing so with a retailer or brand that they are comfortable with, assured of their product quality, and know it will arrive in time. Retailers must focus on strategies that build this loyal customer base — not only by offering the best price, but having a reputation for great quality and service.”

In addition to loyalty, customer service, and correct pricing, retailers need to be aware of several factors on their mobile websites and in native apps to ensure the online shoppers increase in number and not reduce, especially with so much at stake.

“Ultimately, the best apps are resonating with consumers, but a cohesive experience must be created to attract customers,” Tasker said. “We surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers and found that small screens, being shown advertisements, unable to use the ‘pinch and zoom’ functionality within an app, slow performance, poor navigation, irrelevant push notifications, and difficult checkout and payment processes were common frustrations among all age groups, most of which can be enhanced through ongoing optimization efforts.”

The full report, which predicts the top gifts, best dates for deals, mobile shopping data, online sales by growth, and more — all of which has been underpinned by machine learning, processing billions of points of data flowing through the Adobe Marketing Cloud — is available today from the Adobe website.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/27/adobe-predictions-show-only-5-of-shoppers-will-drive-35-of-online-sales/feed/02091284Adobe predictions show only 5% of shoppers will drive 35% of online salesRay Beharry, intelligent fridges, and the $600 million mobile game – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/25/ray-beharry-intelligent-fridges-and-the-600-million-mobile-game-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/25/ray-beharry-intelligent-fridges-and-the-600-million-mobile-game-vb-engage/#respondTue, 25 Oct 2016 16:34:27 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2089788This week, Travis and Stewart talk with Ray Beharry, who is not only the CEO of Pollfish — a mobile survey solution — but an adjunct instructor at NYU. In other words, he’s a very smart man, and he delivers takeaway after takeaway to help you win in today’s mobile-driven market. In the news, we […]
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This week, Travis and Stewart talk with Ray Beharry, who is not only the CEO of Pollfish — a mobile survey solution — but an adjunct instructor at NYU. In other words, he’s a very smart man, and he delivers takeaway after takeaway to help you win in today’s mobile-driven market.

In the news, we discuss some seriously intelligent retail solutions that marry machine learning, mobile, and online sales with interactive mirrors via CheckOut. There’s also talk of messaging app Line’s apparent flatlining, and we reveal how Pokémon GO has managed to reach the $600 million mark faster than any mobile game in history.

Also, this is our first week trying out new designs for our podcast. We’ve chosen four designers and will showcase their concepts over the next four weeks. If you want to contribute a design, email tw@venturebeat.com with your illustration of Stewart and Travis.

This week, we are also going to try out a new format featuring the show highlights. Listen to the show, and tune in to what you want to hear. Or just listen to the whole thing. It is 30 minutes of solid gold.

Listen to the 25th episode of the VB Engage podcast, and you will hear:

How can marketers utilize mobile surveys for research and business? [31:25]

Podcast recap [31:45]

See you next week for Episode 26, with Matt Asay, VP of mobile at Adobe Marketing Cloud [32:05]

Thanks for tuning in this week. We appreciate your awesomeness.

Do you like the new show notes style? Are these helpful to you? Let us know. Or not. Stay tuned. Or not. Subscribe, rate, and review. Or not. (We don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.)

See you next week with Episode 26, which marks exactly half of a year! Six months! Celebrate good times, c’mon. It’s a celebration. But not yet, please hold your celebrations until next week.

Thanks to our sponsor MailChimp for helping to make VB Engage possible.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/25/ray-beharry-intelligent-fridges-and-the-600-million-mobile-game-vb-engage/feed/02089788Ray Beharry, intelligent fridges, and the $600 million mobile game – VB Engage\n Google’s Pixel should rule the world, but it won’t and here’s whyhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/21/googles-pixel-should-rule-the-world-but-it-wont-and-heres-why/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/21/googles-pixel-should-rule-the-world-but-it-wont-and-heres-why/#respondFri, 21 Oct 2016 14:45:19 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2085681OPINION: By all accounts, the Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones ought to have every mobile phone manufacturer quaking in their boots. Reviews of the new Android phone have been mostly positive. There are some that dislike the way Google Assistant works, and there’s no doubt that Google’s messaging apps are in a state right now, […]
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OPINION:

By all accounts, the Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones ought to have every mobile phone manufacturer quaking in their boots.

But Pixel won’t rule the world the way it should. It can’t. Why? Google can’t afford it to succeed, and the company keeps making the same mistakes with its hardware, again and again.

First, let’s put this on record. I’m a fan of Google’s smartphones. I’ve owned every Nexus. I’ve evangelized about them so much that Google ought to be paying me a commission (which I’d refuse, of course).

But let’s take a walk through the Nexus’ history, and I’ll point out Google’s missteps along the way.

While the glass back was as fragile as Donald Trump’s ego, the Nexus 4 was a device that rivaled the latest and greatest smartphones in the industry, only at half the price. It could have ruled the world if the highly shatterable rear had been better designed and if Google had been able to ship the phone in any large numbers.

The Nexus 4’s distribution was plagued with delays and setbacks. Devices started appearing on eBay at prices equivalent to a small car and every time a new batch became available, there was a mad scramble to get an order in the system before they disappeared again.

Back then, you could access devices from the regular Google Play store, but only if you used a desktop browser (or if you forced your mobile browser to serve the desktop page). At no point in time has Google allowed smartphone users to buy more devices or accessories from Google Play using the app on the phone itself, and that is a misstep in my books.

Why can’t I purchase a tablet from my phone or a smartwatch in the Play Store app? Why can’t I buy a case or a charger? I can’t think of a regulatory reason for this idiocy, so what’s the problem?

The Nexus 5 was an altogether more civilized affair. It was typically in stock, but it never shipped in any large numbers. The switch from the Nexus 4 to the Nexus 5, however, gave us a look at misstep number two – Google’s inability to support prior devices.

As soon as the Nexus 5 hit the store, you couldn’t buy a Nexus 4 from Google. Or a Nexus 4 case. Or a Nexus 4 accessory of any kind. This is a constant issue on the Google Play Store, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, has now been split — hardware is now on an entirely separate URL totally disconnected from the Play Store itself.

That’s right. The Google Play store, where you buy or subscribe to everything else Google has to offer, can’t sell you its devices. Only digital products. There’s a separate store for everything you can actually touch.

The Nexus 5X and 6P saw a change in strategy from Google. Both devices were flagship quality, parallel to the latest and greatest from LG, HTC, Samsung, and Huawei, but both had higher price tags than the previously powerful yet cost-effective Nexus 4 and 5.

The continued lack of mass distribution, coupled with the change in strategy, suggests that Google never wants to sell too many of these phones while they are being manufactured by partners. In fact, I would expect that these hardware partners have had it written into their contracts that Google isn’t allowed to sell the devices in seriously large numbers, to help avoid competition with their own-branded phones.

Smartphone margins are scant enough, so diluting your hardware to take a share of a partner device is not going to be a viable strategy for anyone.

The price increase on the 5X and 6P helps maintain some parity there, which reduces the chance that the Google devices will undercut the manufacturers that make them.

Now, the Pixel and Pixel XL have launched. Has anything changed since the Nexus 4? Not really.

Distribution is slightly better since the supply issues of the Nexus 4, but it would appear that – by design, contract, or through an inability to learn from its mistakes – Google isn’t setting itself up for success in hardware, yet again.

And the Store itself is still a mess, not just for Pixel phones, but for everything Google supplies.

For example, the Android Wear section offers a glimpse of all the devices you could own in the glorious header photo, but when you look at the available options, you’re left with a limited choice. Want accessories for that watch you bought? Good luck. You’ll be lucky to find a replacement charger.

Above: A composite image showing the Android Wear dream, along with the two devices on offer (2X Moto 360’s and a Huawei) and the one accessory (UK store)

If you need something to support your existing 5X or 6P, don’t come to Google either. You won’t find anything there. Google’s lack of commitment to any previous incarnation of its phones, tablets, smartwatches, and more is instantly apparent.

That reduces engagement with existing users and stops us from coming back. Sure, most users — especially those without an existing Android device that have been wooed by the reviews — will simply Google “buy Pixel” and be sent to the right page, but for those of us that bought via Google in the first place, the lack of continued support sets a worrying tone.

Then there’s the lack of global distribution to take into account. If you look at Google’s device stores across the world, you see massive differences in offerings, prices, and product availability. Of course, Google is nowhere near as bad at launching outside of the U.S. as Amazon, who typically takes 11 months or more to distribute to other regions — as seen with the Fire tablets, phone, and recently, the Echo — but Google still has improvements to make in this crucial area.

And the last misstep? You can see a massive disconnect between hardware divisions in something as simple as the colors, finishes, and options available across products that are supposed to inhabit the same ecosystem. Why launch a phone in shiny black, silver, and blue, then a VR headset in fabric gray with future options for red and white, and a Google Home assistant that comes in none of those colors? Where’s the continuity?

I want Pixel to rule the world. It should. Google has created a great phone, and while the price tag is comparable to other top-end devices and it’s not the absolute steal the Nexus 4 and 5 were, the Pixel and Pixel XL should be standing on top of the podium right now.

But until Google either manufactures the phone itself (which it could have done if it hadn’t sold Motorola off), or until it fixes its distribution issues or loosens the contractual shackles, that won’t happen. Until it has its hardware divisions talk to each other about continuity, and until it brings the hardware store back into the regular Play Store and makes it accessible from any device, it will continue to suffer.

But then, if it does manufacture a phone for itself and rules the world with it, Google still loses. Its partners will think twice about Android from that point forward (we’ve already seen movements from the likes of Samsung to push its own OS), and the 87+ percent share of the market it enjoys could start to fade.

So, don’t expect the Pixel to do well. It can’t. It has to lose by design. And that’s a shame.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/21/googles-pixel-should-rule-the-world-but-it-wont-and-heres-why/feed/02085681Google’s Pixel should rule the world, but it won’t and here’s whyMark Ghermezian, free sneakers, and how apps are taking over the world – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/mark-ghermezian-free-sneakers-and-how-apps-are-taking-over-the-world-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/mark-ghermezian-free-sneakers-and-how-apps-are-taking-over-the-world-vb-engage/#respondTue, 18 Oct 2016 14:44:30 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2083520As always, we have a great show today, folks. Brace yourselves: This is episode 24. That is two dozen episodes, each of which is rated on a sliding scale somewhere between awesome and epic, just like Stewart. And that is not hyperbole. For instance, in this amazing episode, we have the CEO of Appboy, Mark […]
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As always, we have a great show today, folks. Brace yourselves: This is episode 24. That is two dozen episodes, each of which is rated on a sliding scale somewhere between awesome and epic, just like Stewart. And that is not hyperbole.

For instance, in this amazing episode, we have the CEO of Appboy, Mark Ghermezian, who discusses mobile marketing, mobile CRM, and mobile marketing automation. And don’t forget to check out last week’s episode with David Steinberg of Zeta Interactive.

But first, the news.

This week, Ironsource released a new app called Aura. Aura is not what you think it is. It doesn’t show you people’s energy fields or help put cool lights around your phone. Aura is actually software that will be installed on over 100 million Android devices this year, and it helps you automagicially manage your apps and device.

With Android, many OEM companies will add a bunch of apps to your phone that you can’t delete. Some call it “bloatware” or “shovelware.” Aura will help you manage the out-of-box experience, allowing you to choose what you want. It also helps with bulk app uninstallations, app recommendations, and it helps you manage your phone’s storage space and battery, among other things.

Also in mobile app news, Appsflyer released a research report where they looked at over 50 million installs of top shopping and gaming apps. The study shows how apps are performing during the holiday season, and it tells us when to ramp up on Android and iOS, as they perform very differently.

There are lots of actionable insights in this report that will help people marketing their apps this upcoming holiday season. November and December are right around the corner, and there are some great stats and information for anyone planning a holiday campaign.

Speaking of mobile marketing, our guest this week is Mark Ghermezian, CEO of Appboy. Appboy is a mobile marketing automation platform that helps you build relationships with your customers. Any mobile marketer will want to pay attention to what Mark has to say.

First off, however, Stewart asks Mark about his love of sneakers and why he bought each of the first 100 employees custom Nike IDs with their employee number on the back.

In a moment that could be described as zen-like, Mark explains that “We’re all in the same boat — we’re in the business of our customer’s journey, we are all taking footsteps in the journey in our lives, and we all ended up somehow working at Appboy. I think we all took that step.”

It’s important to keep your customers happy, and it’s crucial to keep your employees happy, as they both have chances to go elsewhere.

Stewart shared VB Insight’s research with Mark around the mobile marketing automation space and how less than 1.5 percent of the addressable market is even using this type of technology.

Why do we think that people aren’t using technologies like mobile marketing automation, marketing automation, or even email marketing? Why is it that tools like MailChimp are still being used for just email and not for marketing automation? When we look at the results of using these tactics, the ROI is amazing, but many businesses still aren’t using them. Why?

Mark explains that the answer is two-fold, and you’re going to want to make sure you hear why in this episode.

We also discuss how Travis recently built out a checklist for a successful mobile app launch (there were over 150 different steps to consider!). He reached out to his friend, Jason Ary, who is a mobile marketing expert and has worked on apps for the NBA, PGA, Dish Network, and Sports Authority. He told Travis that Appboy is a key component for your app and shared the “Success Squad” that Appboy employs to help onboard all new companies’ works.

Mark then explained his thoughts behind having a Success Squad:

There are hundreds of things that are on your checklist to consider while launching an app. And it’s overwhelming. Today mobile marketing automation is all about iOS and Android, being able to move at the speed of them updating their OS’s. It’s cookie-less, it’s understanding when to message them. Should it be a push message? Should it be an email? Should it be an in-app message? There is so much stuff that goes into mobile marketing automation that is much different from desktop marketing.

We discuss how the smartphone really is very different from anything else we had before. It really is the one device that is incredibly personal and private, so marketing on it is completely different.

This was a fascinating discussion with one of the top mobile marketing automation minds in the world. Make sure to listen to the whole thing, because that makes Stewart smile.

Next week, we have Ray Beharry, adjunct instructor of digital content and mobile marketing at New York University, and head of marketing at Pollfish — be sure to tune into that.

Also, a mafia don has been threatening us, saying if we don’t get more ratings and reviews — on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and Google Play — that Travis’ dog, Reggie, will be wearing concrete shoes. Please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast because of this fake mafia don story made up entirely by Travis. Thanks.

Thanks to our sponsor MailChimp for helping to make VB Engage possible.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/18/mark-ghermezian-free-sneakers-and-how-apps-are-taking-over-the-world-vb-engage/feed/02083520Mark Ghermezian, free sneakers, and how apps are taking over the world – VB Engage\n 94% of consumers would use mobile wallets more if they gave something backhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/94-of-consumers-would-use-mobile-wallets-more-if-they-gave-something-back/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/94-of-consumers-would-use-mobile-wallets-more-if-they-gave-something-back/#respondMon, 17 Oct 2016 12:03:34 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2080683EXCLUSIVE: We already know that mobile wallets and payment solutions drive in-store sales, and we understand that loyalty schemes are a big part of that story. But what will it take to get consumers using mobile wallets more regularly? To find the answer, Points surveyed 1,500 consumers to produce a new study — “The State of Mobile […]
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But what will it take to get consumers using mobile wallets more regularly?

To find the answer, Points surveyed 1,500 consumers to produce a new study — “The State of Mobile Wallet Loyalty and Engagement in 2016” — and one result stood out as the main driver for future success.

Almost all consumers (94.4 percent, in fact) said they would use a mobile wallet more frequently if they could earn and redeem loyalty points and miles with every transaction.

While Points has an obvious interest in this result, the sample size is significant, and the results fall in line with other recent studies. It seems the answer to getting people to pay with their smartphones lies not in the convenience of doing so, but in what they get back if they do.

The report, however, also highlights a barrier to success: security concerns.

The security aspects of mobile wallets are, in reality, strong. But that isn’t the issue. Consumers are worried about “perceived” security issues, much in the way people mistrusted online transactions in the beginning.

“Consumers are still skeptical of mobile wallet security, and it’s been one of the major hurdles holding mobile wallets back from mass adoption,” Christopher Barnard, president and cofounder at Points told me. “People place a very high level of importance on security. Our study found that nearly four in five people said security was one of the most important features they look at when considering a mobile wallet.”

So how can mobile wallet providers fix this?

“The best way wallet providers can improve the perception of security and decrease this skepticism is by educating users on the measures and precautions that they’ve put in place — providing consumers with peace of mind,” Barnard said. “It’s also important that any integrated services are just as secure as the mobile wallet they’re using. When a consumer knows that their money is safe and access to their credit card and banking information is locked down, they’ll be much more likely to engage with a mobile wallet.”

Security aside, driving mobile wallet usage through loyalty schemes is all well and good, but consumers may get “loyalty fatigue” as they become members of too many programs. With individual loyalty schemes, three leading hardware-focused wallets (Android, Apple, Samsung), a whole slew of third-party payment apps, not to mention pre-paid apps like Starbucks, how likely is it that we’ll see consolidation in this space, and how much is this fragmentation hurting adoption?

“While all this fragmentation is hurting adoption on the whole, it is helping to show us what’s working and what consumers want from mobile wallets,” Barnard said. “Most wallets do a couple of things especially well, but no one wallet has emerged as the single go-to for a critical mass of users. As these different solutions learn from each other, we’ll see consolidation happen as more providers hone in on aspects of mobile wallets that are really driving value and engagement. And we’ll see adoption increase when more solutions are able to deliver a more complete user experience.”

So what does the future look like, and what is the key to mass adoption?

“Consumers are looking for more ways to use their mobile wallets beyond payments,” Barnard said. “For example, most people have a rewards-earning credit card — they’re motivated to use certain cards on certain purchases because of the rewards incentive. Mobile wallets can offer the same opportunity when integrated with loyalty rewards. The study also found that nearly all consumers said that they would use a mobile wallet more frequently if they could earn or redeem loyalty points and miles with every purchase. This is a testimony to the fact that we’ll see greater adoption when more providers begin to integrate loyalty into their wallets.”

“The State of Mobile Wallet Loyalty and Engagement in 2016” report is available today from the Points website.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/94-of-consumers-would-use-mobile-wallets-more-if-they-gave-something-back/feed/0208068394% of consumers would use mobile wallets more if they gave something backApp Annie study shows U.S. retail leads the way in mobile disruptionhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/app-annie-study-shows-u-s-retail-leads-the-way-in-mobile-disruption/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/app-annie-study-shows-u-s-retail-leads-the-way-in-mobile-disruption/#respondMon, 17 Oct 2016 09:55:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2082386For years, the retail industry has been talking about the rise of mobile and how it may disrupt everything. But according to a new report released today by App Annie — an app analytics and market intelligence company — the future is already here. Mobile, especially in the U.S., has already taken over. Looking at […]
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For years, the retail industry has been talking about the rise of mobile and how it may disrupt everything.

But according to a new report released today by App Annie — an app analytics and market intelligence company — the future is already here. Mobile, especially in the U.S., has already taken over.

Looking at both online-first and “bricks-and-clicks” retailers, the study shows that, while mobile is affecting everyone, the U.S. is apparently leading the way.

“Most surprising is how well U.S. bricks-and-clicks retailers are doing relative to others outside of the U.S.,” Danielle Levitas, SVP of research and marketing communications at App Annie, told me. “Specifically, across the several countries we looked at in this report, time in apps of bricks-and-clicks was up 40 percent year over year (versus online-first, up 50 percent). However, in the U.S., time spent within bricks-and-clicks apps was up 55 percent versus online-first, up 60 percent. I think this demonstrates more innovation among top US retailers.”

It isn’t all good news for mobile. France has the lowest average number of sessions for bricks-and-clicks apps and saw a decline over the past 12 months. However, with the second-highest growth in sessions for online-first apps, there is a demand here that traditional retailers should take advantage of.

What is next for bricks-and-clicks retailers in the battle to increase loyalty and retain customers?

“Mobile is clearly disrupting bricks-and-clicks retailers — the rules of customer engagement are changing, as is the competitive landscape,” Levitas said. “Fortunately, mobile apps are also an opportunity for bricks-and-clicks retailers to increase customer loyalty, engagement, and spend. Through effective user acquisition and retention strategies — which can and should leverage some combination of paid acquisition, app store optimization (ASO), social shopping, and loyalty/deals programs — retailers retain their best customers and capture more revenue.”

The answer, then, is to find ways to take advantage of precisely what the online-first retailers don’t have.

“Ultimately, bricks-and-clicks retailers have to continue to innovate and leverage the advantage of having physical locations,” Levitas said. “A couple of prime — and innovative — examples are Macy’s piloting IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence for a shopping assistant; Home Depot, and the success of geo-targeted mobile ads to drive foot traffic to stores [and convert that traffic] into purchases; and Target’s ‘cartwheel app’ that drives high engagement and transactions through deals and savings.”

With chatbots on the rise and negating the need to install an app for every retailer, will we see a shift toward using messaging platforms for retail disruption?

“If done well (namely, with contextual and accurate responses), bots could be a great tool for customer service and support within apps,” Levitas said. “Well-executed bots may become effective on ramps for consumers to initially engage a brand (like the mobile web is today). But I believe brands need to have a direct relationship with customers via their apps to deliver optimized experiences, customer intimacy, and better monetization. Bottom line, I don’t believe the A.I. driving bots is good enough not to frustrate most consumers for the foreseeable future.”

Outside of the regular retail apps, one app in Japan is making waves and could prove an interesting competitor in future.

“Mercari — think of an app-first eBay,” Levitas said. “Many haven’t heard of it, but its monthly active users has grown 280 percent to well over a million year-over-year. The company is Japanese and has been incredibly successful in the C2C space in Japan, and, through social (not paid UA), it drove this level of users here in the U.S..”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/17/app-annie-study-shows-u-s-retail-leads-the-way-in-mobile-disruption/feed/02082386App Annie study shows U.S. retail leads the way in mobile disruptionNew study shows chatbots have a retention issue: Here’s how to fix that (VB Live)http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/new-study-shows-chatbots-have-a-retention-issue-heres-how-to-fix-that-vb-live/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/new-study-shows-chatbots-have-a-retention-issue-heres-how-to-fix-that-vb-live/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2016 15:10:13 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2074761Chatbots are the Now Big Thing and, of course, you want to be on board. But if you misstep, you’ll be hurting your business rather than hurtling it into the future. Join this VB Live event for the results of our exclusive chatbot study, plus real-world insights from experts into doing bots right at any […]
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Chatbots are the Now Big Thing and, of course, you want to be on board. But if you misstep, you’ll be hurting your business rather than hurtling it into the future. Join this VB Live event for the results of our exclusive chatbot study, plus real-world insights from experts into doing bots right at any budget.

Chatbots are becoming increasingly mainstream. But there are signs that all is not well in Botland.

Using data supplied by Pollfish, a new study from VB Insight — the research arm of VentureBeat — shows promising trends, but also a few that should worry every budding chatbot builder.

The study, and how to fix the problems that currently exist, will be the main point of conversation in a future VB Live session. Hosted by our director of marketing technology, Stewart Rogers, and featuring special guest Veronica Belmont, a veteran of the tech industry, prolific content creator, presenter, and product manager at Growbot.io, it promises to be an eye-opening episode.

The most telling stat in the new study revolves around consumer preferences. When it comes to using a brand’s website, native app, or chatbot, messaging app users have made it very clear what they prefer.

Less than 14 percent will gravitate toward the chatbot as their primary choice when it comes to connecting with brands. Mobile websites score slightly higher, but the majority of users still cite apps as their primary choice.

“That’s likely because the chatbot experience, right now, is lacking when it comes to engagement, user experience, and understanding the customer journey,” Rogers said. “We’re very early in the evolution of conversation user interfaces, and while it is clear that the vast majority of consumers use messaging apps — and consider them necessary — the bots themselves leave a lot to be desired.”

So, how will we go about fixing the problem? It is going to come down to design, personality, functionality, and delivering on the promise of a shorter, more enjoyable experience for consumers.

In the forthcoming VB Live session, which you can watch live or on demand after registering, we’ll reveal for the first time what the study — which took in responses from 1,000 U.S. consumers — has to say about:

What messaging platforms people use the most

How many people have used chatbots and what percentage of those are “raving fans” of the genre

Whether consumers are spending money using chatbots

How important messaging apps are

And you’ll learn from Veronica Belmont what you can do about the shortcomings, what you can glean from this new study, and how to make sure your chatbot cuts the conversational mustard.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/new-study-shows-chatbots-have-a-retention-issue-heres-how-to-fix-that-vb-live/feed/02074761New study shows chatbots have a retention issue: Here’s how to fix that (VB Live)Study shows triggered push notifications are 2,770% better than batch messageshttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/study-shows-triggered-push-notifications-are-2770-better-than-batch-messages/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/study-shows-triggered-push-notifications-are-2770-better-than-batch-messages/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2016 14:30:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2080016EXCLUSIVE: Yes. You read that right. If you send a push notification to a mobile user based on events particular to that user, rather than a notification to every user at the same time, you’ll get a 2,770 percent increase in engagement. That’s according to a new study released today by Blueshift, who analyzed 2 billion […]
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EXCLUSIVE:

Yes. You read that right.

If you send a push notification to a mobile user based on events particular to that user, rather than a notification to every user at the same time, you’ll get a 2,770 percent increase in engagement.

That’s according to a new study released today by Blueshift, who analyzed 2 billion emails and push notifications to find out how effective triggered messages are in comparison to those sent to every user, or every member of an email list.

What do we mean by a triggered event?

When a consumer interacts with your website, app, email, or any other message sent through any channel, you can send a corresponding message or notification because of that. Maybe the trigger you’re looking for is an interaction with an onboarding email or a retargeting ad. Maybe it is because the consumer has been using your app for a specific amount of time, or because the price of an item your customer was interested in — but didn’t buy — just changed. There are lots of trigger types, but the result of sending emails and push notifications at the right time is staggering, according to this study.

Triggered emails drive 624 percent higher conversion responses for the same number of sends as compared to “batch and blast” emails. This is driven by a 381 percent higher click rate, and an 180 percent higher post-click conversion rate.

Even more staggering, triggered mobile push notifications drive 2,770 percent higher conversion rates for the same number of sends as compared to batch and blast mobile push notifications. This is driven by a 726 percent higher click rate and a 420 percent higher post-click conversion rate.

The report shows that different types of triggers perform with varying success. For example, retargeting triggers do particularly well via push notifications — much better than sending an email after a retargeting ad has been clicked. Email is better for recommendation triggers, such as the use of “get the look” or “wishlist” features on a retail website.

“In general, push notifications work well for targeting near-term intent and quick decisions on the part of customers, whereas email is better for encouraging additional browsing and targeting persistent interests,” Vijay Chittoor, cofounder and CEO at Blueshift, told me. “That’s part of the reason re-marketing triggers work especially well on push, and recommendation triggers work especially well on email.”

While triggered push notifications are apparently performing well against their batch counterparts, VB Insight research shows that email still has the highest ROI of any marketing channel. Why is that?

“Email has the highest ROI for three reasons,” Chittoor said. “It’s a channel that can be used with all ‘platforms’ — website customers can receive an email, but so can app users and store customers. Customers can consume emails at the time of their choice, sometimes hours after it’s sent. And email offers marketers a lot of real estate to deliver a message leading to higher efficacy.”

So will we see a day when mobile notifications usurp the ROI attainable from email?

“Mobile push notifications will always be limited with regards to reach since they can only be sent to users who have the app installed,” Chittoor said. “For some businesses like Uber, that number is 100 percent, but for many other businesses mobile app install rate will be a smaller fraction of customers. However, if iOS and Android continue the recent trend in improving the interactivity of push notifications and improvements to the notification centers, their efficacy could potentially overtake email in the future.”

“In my previous experience as a marketer, I have also found it useful to look at mobile as a marketing channel (e.g. mobile push channel, compared to email channel), as well as to look at it as a platform (mobile app and mobile website as platforms, versus desktop web platform),” Chittoor said. “While mobile as a marketing channel might take longer to overtake email, mobile as a platform has already overtaken desktop as a platform for many companies.”

So what’s next for personalized marketing? Apparently it’s driving significant improvements in engagement over batch and blast tactics.

“We talk about three frontiers of personalization, and what’s next along each of them,” Chittoor said. “Moving from batch and blast personalization, to segmented, and finally to triggered 1:1 personalization. Moving from manual personalization, to rule-based but automated, and finally to predictive personalization. And moving from single channel to multi-channel personalization, and finally to unifying the personalization experience across channels.”

The report, which breaks down engagement rates by trigger type and includes details of both triggered emails and mobile push notifications, is available today from the Blueshift website.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/study-shows-triggered-push-notifications-are-2770-better-than-batch-messages/feed/02080016Study shows triggered push notifications are 2,770% better than batch messagesFanbytes launches its programmatic Snapchat influencer marketing platformhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/fanbytes-launches-its-programmatic-snapchat-influencer-marketing-platform/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/fanbytes-launches-its-programmatic-snapchat-influencer-marketing-platform/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2016 13:30:17 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2079763EXCLUSIVE: Influencer marketing continues to grab the attention of brands everywhere, especially in light of the ongoing attack on advertising through ad blockers. But one network that has proven difficult to tap into — thanks to its stance on third-party tools using its API and difficulties measuring performance metrics — is Snapchat. Today, Fanbytes — a […]
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EXCLUSIVE:

Influencer marketing continues to grab the attention of brands everywhere, especially in light of the ongoing attack on advertising through ad blockers.

But one network that has proven difficult to tap into — thanks to its stance on third-party tools using its API and difficulties measuring performance metrics — is Snapchat.

Today, Fanbytes — a UK startup run by a group of young entrepreneurs and engineers — is announcing the launch of its programmatic Snapchat influencer network and performance measurement platform. The product uses a combination of both content and technology to solve the problem of how to use Snap Inc’s ephemeral messaging platform for influencer marketing purposes.

The company itself is a testament to the influence being wielded by the “Snapchat generation.” Founded by three 20-somethings, it has grown into a seven-figure business in less than 18 months. Instead of following the agency business model, Fanbytes has made its technology available as a self-service platform.

So how does it work?

Fanbytes — which started out by providing influencer marketing content on YouTube for clients such as Adidas, Puma, and Disney — has built a media network that has already clocked up an impressive 5 million views.

Customers select the audience they want to target, and Fanbytes will then determine the best mix of influencers to reach that target demographic. This includes the ability to target by location.

“The influencers create the content, and they distribute it across Snapchat,” Timothy Armoo, CEO, and cofounder at Fanbytes, told me. “Many times, there is the opportunity to also do cross-promotion around an influencer’s Twitter and YouTube audiences. We’ve built a SaaS tool to help brands manage their account.”

Fanbytes then uses its technology layer, without using the Snapchat API, to assess performance and understand how well the campaign is performing — measuring views, screenshots, and story completion rates.

“We’ve built a layer of semantic data technology on top of our platforms, enabling brands to find the perfect influencers,” Armoo said. “We’ve developed our proprietary technology, which interfaces with the Snapchat app, enabling brands to be able to measure performance and analytics across Snapchat. It was a hard technical feat — it’s what happens when a group of geeky 21-year-olds go into a room for a week and refuse to leave until it’s done.”

Fanbytes also makes use of smart, short URLs to promote “virtual click-through.” Snapchat doesn’t allow for actual click-through from snaps, but with a short, memorable URL, users can head straight from the story to their browser to type in a URL that invariably leads to a landing page with information, an offer, or a sign-up form.

“We’ve built an analytics dashboard helping brands track results,” Armoo said. “Everything from attribution to short links is included in the dashboard, enabling brands to get a full 360-degree view of how they are doing.”

While initially focusing on the entertainment industry, Fanbytes is launching with an extended network that takes in such verticals as fashion, beauty, gaming, and fitness. The company estimates its launch network will generate around 50 million monthly views. Pricing is variable based on the campaign.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/14/fanbytes-launches-its-programmatic-snapchat-influencer-marketing-platform/feed/02079763Fanbytes launches its programmatic Snapchat influencer marketing platformmParticle lands $17.5 million to boost access to ‘third wave’ of mobile datahttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/mparticle-lands-17-million-to-enable-brands-to-do-more-with-mobile-data/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/mparticle-lands-17-million-to-enable-brands-to-do-more-with-mobile-data/#respondThu, 13 Oct 2016 13:00:04 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2077885Mobile data is key to a brand’s marketing and engineering success. To be data-driven in a world where the smartphone is only ever three feet away from the average consumer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week means collecting mobile data above everything. Today, mParticle — a mobile data platform that allows brands to gather and […]
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Mobile data is key to a brand’s marketing and engineering success. To be data-driven in a world where the smartphone is only ever three feet away from the average consumer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week means collecting mobile data above everything.

Today, mParticle — a mobile data platform that allows brands to gather and connect customer information — has announced a Series B funding round of $17.5 million, led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures, along with existing investor Social Capital.

The funds will be used to continue the recent success of the company, which is on track to grow its 2016 revenues 4X over last year.

“The punchline is that we need a little bit of everything,” Michael Katz, cofounder and CEO at mParticle told me. “We need continued research and development, for example. I think we’ve cracked the code on a couple of products we feel will be relatively transformative, but need to get them over the finish line.”

The company is also setting its sights on new pastures.

“The funds will also be used for international expansion,” Katz said. “We have some big clients that are headquartered in various regions outside the U.S., but we don’t have an EMEA office, for example.”

The raise brings mParticle’s total funding to $37 million since its inception, and much has changed in the mobile marketplace during that time.

“The market continues to become more ready and willing to adopt a solution like ours,” Katz said. “We started this in 2013, and we were certainly early to market, but as tools have proliferated and consumers have gone completely mobile, brands have to keep pace with them.”

mParticle collects data from three main areas: the web, native apps, and SaaS tools. Incorporating all of those sources helps the company provide a single source of customer data for its clients.

“Once you have all that data, you can truly understand the consumer and break out of the classic marketing and analytics ceilings,” Katz said.

In conjunction with the raise, mParticle is also announcing the launch of its Profiles API, which allows its clients to query any record in their mParticle account and append that data to any existing system.

“Ultimately, we have a pretty universal source of truth for many brands, because we have a unified look at data across many touchpoints,” Katz said. “We want to make it easy to surface that data and make it actionable, append it to any other data.”

That means the ability to add data from the account to a help desk, analytics system, marketing tool, or any other internal solution.

And as the market continues to invest heavily in new platforms, such as connected TV, mParticle is in a good position to collect and leverage that data, as well, despite the challenges that exist.

Collecting data from connected TV, for example, is different from getting data on a smartphone, which is a personal device. When collecting data from connected TV systems, it is much harder to know who is in front of that shared device. It is a problem Katz is aware of, and one that mParticle is making inroads into understanding.

“Thinking that you can use your legacy web platform to take part in this discussion is a complete non-starter,” Katz said. “The fact that we’re helping brands capture data across all connected devices means that we’re at least building that holistic view. The connected TV is a little different — you get family members that may aggregate around a TV for an event. How do you take that one-to-one data-driven approach and apply it to that situation? I think, to me, it lends another view or dimension to the individual. Eventually, we’ll get to a state where we can break down the family and understand that landscape.”

Ultimately, this funding round is about staying ahead in what Katz calls the “third wave of data platforms.”

The concept of a data platform has been around for a long time — it goes back to the late ’80s,” Katz said. “The second wave was via web data platforms — the DMPs and tag management systems that helped brands adapt to the evolution that was taking place — capturing anonymous data and capturing it in real time. But now we’re in the third wave. It is now about apps across all connected devices. What started in mobile has now extended to your living room, on your wrist, in your car. All of these consumer touchpoints where the experience just doesn’t happen in a browser.”

And that presents new challenges.

“The data challenges are fundamentally different to anything we’ve seen before,” Katz said. “If the web was about ‘real time’, then apps are about ‘all the time’. Even when your phone is just sitting there doing nothing, it is reporting everything. App crashes, device telemetry, multiple identities, app interactions — more data than ever before.”

Sign up for Funding Daily: Get the latest news in your inbox every weekday.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/13/mparticle-lands-17-million-to-enable-brands-to-do-more-with-mobile-data/feed/02077885mParticle lands $17.5 million to boost access to ‘third wave’ of mobile dataIronSource launches Aura to give 100 million smartphone users the cure to shovelwarehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/11/ironsource-launches-aura-to-give-100-million-smartphone-users-the-cure-to-shovelware/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/11/ironsource-launches-aura-to-give-100-million-smartphone-users-the-cure-to-shovelware/#respondTue, 11 Oct 2016 13:00:10 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2076866If you’re an Android user, you’ve probably had a terrible experience with shovelware — the “helpful” apps manufacturers and carriers add to your phone without asking. Typically, these apps suck up precious storage space. Even worse — like a free U2 album — they’re universally disliked and can’t be deleted. And as far as mobile […]
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If you’re an Android user, you’ve probably had a terrible experience with shovelware — the “helpful” apps manufacturers and carriers add to your phone without asking.

Typically, these apps suck up precious storage space. Even worse — like a free U2 album — they’re universally disliked and can’t be deleted. And as far as mobile experiences go, they set the customer off on the wrong foot — creating negative triggers that bite into customer loyalty.

Today, after an extended period in stealth mode, IronSource launches Aura, a new customization platform that promises not only to bring an end to this kind of practice but also to deliver personalized app and device recommendations that could help consumers make better, more positive use of their devices for longer.

The company has already secured deals with over 30 device manufacturers and tier-one carriers around the world, including the likes of HTC and ASUS. In fact, Aura is expected to appear on more than 100 million devices worldwide this year — smartphones that use either Android and Windows can use Aura.

Ending shovelware is just part of the story, so what else can Aura do, and why is it so important?

“Aura consists of two main products,” Giancarlo Fasolo, EVP of sales and marketing at IronSource Enterprise Solutions told me. “the ‘out-of-box experience’ that transforms the archaic, preloaded app model, and ‘smart notifications’ that recommend content at the time the user needs it.”

When a user opens their brand-new, shiny Android device and switches it on for the first time, Aura will provide a personalized experience.

“A lot of folks in the industry preload a bunch of apps, but often this frustrates the user, as they can’t get rid of them,” Fasolo said. “We create an out-of-box experience that allows users to preview selections of apps they’ll be interested in. Then, those apps are installed.”

These app recommendations are driven through IronSource’s partnerships with advertisers, OEMs, and carriers. Using interest and demographic data, as well as advertiser preferences, Aura can provide users with personalized app recommendations from brand-safe apps.

Once the phone is set up the way the user wants it, the system works in the background to provide smart notifications that trigger based on real-life scenarios.

“For example, if a consumer is running low on memory, and we also know they’re not using a photo backup service (Google Photos, Dropbox, etc.), we can notify them and promote a solution,” Fasolo said. “We can then walk the user through how to install the solution and use it.”

That’s a big step forward for proactive support, solving problems such as low memory, poor battery life, and location changes. Battery life can often be linked to having too many apps installed, and so Aura can offer smart suggestions as to which apps haven’t been used in a long time, and provide a one-click uninstall.

“Let’s say you change your location from New York to Las Vegas,” Fasolo said. “We can push notifications to recommend local apps so that you can book restaurant tables, find great local experiences, and more.”

Aura’s smart notifications are incredibly rich. Instead of an on-line notification, users see a card that offers high levels of information and context, helping drive action and create a positive experience.

So is Aura the answer to shovelware?

“Response to Aura has been mostly positive,” Fasolo said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get to a place where manufacturers won’t put their brand apps on a device, but we see our role as dramatically reducing the shovelware and promoting the brand’s apps as part of the onboarding process.”

That, along with Aura’s ability to improve device upkeep and offer useful notifications should, in theory, increase customer satisfaction. The downside for manufacturers is that people may keep their phones for longer, but if the experience helps create a stronger emotional bond between the brand or carrier and the user, at least it should result in more repeat business.

And that makes sense financially. While the smartphone market is booming, margins are becoming increasingly slimmer. IronSource claims that initial deployments of Aura show it adding $3 to $5 per device in additional lifetime value for its partners.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/11/ironsource-launches-aura-to-give-100-million-smartphone-users-the-cure-to-shovelware/feed/02076866IronSource launches Aura to give 100 million smartphone users the cure to shovelwareNeumob brings its app acceleration technology to Chinahttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/07/neumob-brings-its-app-acceleration-technology-to-china/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/07/neumob-brings-its-app-acceleration-technology-to-china/#respondFri, 07 Oct 2016 15:30:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2073743EXCLUSIVE: There are many reasons a user might choose to uninstall your app. Maybe it is annoying. Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it just plain sucks. But increasingly, and especially in markets where 4G data speeds are a mere dream, consumers uninstall apps — or even avoid installing them in the first place — because of speed […]
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EXCLUSIVE:

There are many reasons a user might choose to uninstall your app. Maybe it is annoying. Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it just plain sucks.

But increasingly, and especially in markets where 4G data speeds are a mere dream, consumers uninstall apps — or even avoid installing them in the first place — because of speed and file size.

Today, Neumob has announced a notable expansion of its app acceleration technology, with a particular focus on speeding app performance in China.

Neumob already operates across 64 metropolitan areas, including Europe and North America, but today’s expansion is significant because China has unique challenges, especially for Western app developers that want to launch there.

“Aside from the marketplace there being set up to favor Chinese-made apps, the most important hindrance is China’s networks themselves,” Jeff Kim, CEO at Neumob, told me. “All app traffic must travel a patchwork of congested 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, each subject to a Chinese government firewall that further slows traffic down. Our customers often find that even when they’re able to gain traction with Chinese consumers, their app performance suffers as a result, with slow load times and increased in-app errors being the norm.”

That’s important in a marketplace where smartphones and apps rule. In the U.S., 72 percent of online users own a smartphone, but in China, that rises massively to 92 percent — over 599 million people.

So how does Neumob work?

“Neumob accelerates everything in an app — every image, every third-party call, and every embedded ad network SDK — thereby bypassing the country’s endemic network problems and making for a smooth, pleasurable app experience,” Kim said.

Implementation is relatively painless. App owners install a two-line SDK into their app or game, and Neumob handles the rest.

Of course, speed is just one important factor when it comes to the Chinese app market. We shouldn’t ignore the other big challenges ahead if Western app developers want to win in China, and that includes cultural and localization best practices that have to be adhered to.

“There are several behemoth one-app-that-does-many-things apps that dominate app traffic in China, with WeChat being the most popular,” Kim said. “We don’t see many of these in Western markets. Because an Android developer doesn’t truly have a legal Google Play marketplace to deploy to in China, their main localization play is to develop versions for China’s local app stores, like Baidu’s and Tencent’s, and to (obviously) ensure language localization. Piracy has been a traditional concern as well: Many popular apps have duplicates available in app stores, which calls forth the need for a local, market-savvy partner to help ensure that duplicates are removed and that other local rules and regulations are complied with.”

Neumob’s new acceleration nodes include multiple points of presence in Beijing and Shanghai. Also, it has added to its network in Guangzhou, Qingdao, and Hong Kong. Neumob has also added new points of presence across India, Sweden, Australia, and elsewhere, as part of this latest expansion.

While Neumob provides startup app developers with up to 50GB of free app acceleration and error reduction every month, in virtually all areas of the world, access to the newly expanded acceleration network in China requires integration of its 2-line SDK, which is available on the Neumob Enterprise plan, details of which may be obtained on request.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/07/neumob-brings-its-app-acceleration-technology-to-china/feed/02073743Neumob brings its app acceleration technology to ChinaApple’s App Store search ads launch: 3 things you should knowhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/05/apples-app-store-search-ads-launch-3-things-you-should-know/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/05/apples-app-store-search-ads-launch-3-things-you-should-know/#respondThu, 06 Oct 2016 00:30:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2072966ANALYSIS: Apple’s long-promised and long-awaited search ads are finally here — or almost here. And they’re going to be tremendously important for app publishers and marketers, since 65-80 percent of all app installs happen after a search on either the App Store or Google Play. But not everything works the way app publishers might think. At a basic level, […]
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ANALYSIS:

Apple’s long-promised and long-awaited search ads are finally here — or almost here. And they’re going to be tremendously important for app publishers and marketers, since 65-80 percent of all app installs happen after a search on either the App Store or Google Play.

But not everything works the way app publishers might think.

At a basic level, Apple’s new app search ads work fairly similarly to Google’s AdWords. As you’d expect, Apple is using the technology for its now-shuttered Apple iAd network for these units. And also as you’d expect, Apple’s App Store search engine determines how relevant your ad is to what someone is searching for, and shows the ad if it matches. Higher matches will show before your ad shows, and higher bids will show before lower bids, assuming all else is roughly equal.

However, there are at least three key things for mobile marketers to keep in mind.

One, relevance seems to be more important to Apple than the amount you’re willing to bid. Not shockingly, Apple is very concerned about user experience, and irrelevant ads are a bad experience. If people don’t find your ad or your app appealing and don’t click on it, Apple will stop showing your ad, regardless of your bid.

Two, a major difference from most advertising experiences that marketers are familiar with is that the only creative you can use is material Apple has already approved in your app listing on the App Store. You cannot create and upload new ads, images, or copy, which means that if you want to change your ads, you need to update your actual app name, screenshots, video, or description.

This is part of how Apple is attempting to maintain quality and relevance of experience: relying on the App Store approval process to essentially also be the ad approval process.

Three, Apple provides data to advertisers that includes the keywords that people searched on before clicking on their ads, which will help app publishers understand their potential users better. This is data that iOS app marketers have never received before, and it’s incredibly helpful in determining what potential users you are attracting.

In fact, getting access to this data is probably reason enough to run at least some low-level paid user acquisition campaigns with Apple.

There’s actually one more big thing Apple is revealing now.

For the first time ever, Apple is now providing data that indicates keyword popularity. This is tremendously important for mobile marketers because it tells you what keywords to focus on when improving your App Store optimization. Focusing on keywords that 10 people search for is clearly a bad idea if you could focus on keywords that 10 million people search for.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/05/apples-app-store-search-ads-launch-3-things-you-should-know/feed/02072966Apple’s App Store search ads launch: 3 things you should knowMarshall Kirkpatrick, faulty Facebook, and what AdWeek taught us about content – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/10/04/marshall-kirkpatrick-faulty-facebook-and-what-adweek-taught-us-about-content-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/04/marshall-kirkpatrick-faulty-facebook-and-what-adweek-taught-us-about-content-vb-engage/#respondTue, 04 Oct 2016 14:47:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2071370Welcome to episode 22 of VB Engage! In this week’s epic-sode, Stewart and Travis chat with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird and talk about finding ideal influencers for any topic or geography. And during the news portion of the show, Travis and Stewart discuss Advertising Week in NYC. We talk about how Facebook has been […]
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Welcome to episode 22 of VB Engage! In this week’s epic-sode, Stewart and Travis chat with Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird and talk about finding ideal influencers for any topic or geography.

And during the news portion of the show, Travis and Stewart discuss Advertising Week in NYC. We talk about how Facebook has been misrepresenting video views and how your content probably sucks. That’s right — you heard us.

If you missed last week’s VB Engage, we interviewed Adam Goldstein, cofounder and CEO of Hipmunk. We discussed machine learning and how his company created its incredible chatbot. Oh, and Hipmunk got acquired a couple of weeks after we interviewed Adam. If you want your startup to get acquired for millions of dollars, you clearly need to be on the VB Engage podcast.

While Stewart was in New York City this week, Travis was in San Francisco, where he checked out the Minnesota Street Art Project, which Adobe has partnered with. If you are in the Bay Area, this is a great place that is supporting the arts for under-market rent pricing.

Adobe is working with a multitude of artists to research how they might use virtual reality to create art. The company is then putting that information toward the development of its next creative software suite for digital design. If you want to check it out, here’s a Facebook livestream from the event — the VR section starts around 32 minutes in.

Regardless of how Facebook counts its users, video views, and ad impressions, it is a huge community and one that every business wants to leverage. But when it comes to video, Facebook is used entirely differently from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion, and other video-centric properties. You can find out more about that and all the other AdWeek news in this handy roundup.

The other big story is a recent report from Beckon that shows how brand content creation has increased 300 percent year-over-year. That’s huge. But more content doesn’t mean that it’s better, or that it’s the right kind of content. In fact, the report shows that only 5 percent of branded content got any real engagement whatsoever. Most of this content has single digit shares, if any.

That’s big. Travis talks about why it’s a good idea to amplify the good content already written about you. Some brands spend millions on commercials and television advertising, along with money spent on content, but they don’t spend much sponsoring the good things written about them by others. Travis’ pro tip? If you re-post the content on your own property and then sponsor the posts, you can capture the visitors in a retargeting pixel.

So the news is this: Your content essentially sucks. Sorry about that.

If you want to find amazing content, tune into our guest this week — the legendary Marshall Kirkpatrick, cofounder of Little Bird Technologies. Marshall is a former tech editor at ReadWriteWeb and was the first paid writer at TechCrunch. He curated research while using advanced search tactics on Google to create a custom search engine around key topics. With Little Bird, he has pursued the discovery of influencers, subject matter experts, and thought leaders — tailored to any topic or geography.

We talk with Marshall about using mobile devices to stay in constant contact with influencers. Using push notifications, DMs, email, and real-time alerts with keywords, marketers can get in front of the influencers they are trying to work with, wherever they may be.

One of the things that Little Bird can do is find the main subject matter experts on a topic and give you a list of their websites. It can then monitor each influencer and find the content they create or share.

We talk with Marshall about how Autodesk launched a 3D-printing operating system through influencer marketing.

Autodesk was able to jump in and participate in conversations around 3D printing — having its team comment on blogs, retweet messages, and share the content influencers were creating. In the months leading up to its launch, it built a network containing a metric tonne of new influencers. You’ll hear how it all comes down to building relationships with the ideal type of person.

On this episode, Marshall drops all kinds of wisdom about how to discover experts on any topic. He even shares some of his Google search secrets, and, as a reward for reading this far, here’s a link to Marshall’s Secret Search. It’s a search engine that returns results from only the top tech publications.

As always, listen to VB Engage. Subscribe to VB Engage. Rate it 5+ stars. High-five a random person. Tell yourself that you’re a winner. Listen to more VB Engage. Become smarter. Become better looking*.

Rating and reviewing VB Engage is also a good way to look cool around your peers.

*Results may vary.

Tune in next week for our interview with David Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Interactive. We talk about some really amazing topics, but we’re not going to tell you about it right now — you’ll just have to listen.

Thanks to our sponsor MailChimp for helping to make VB Engage possible.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/04/marshall-kirkpatrick-faulty-facebook-and-what-adweek-taught-us-about-content-vb-engage/feed/02071370Marshall Kirkpatrick, faulty Facebook, and what AdWeek taught us about content – VB Engage\n Adam Goldstein, avoiding Chinese airlines, and Snapchat’s biggest problem – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/27/adam-goldstein-avoiding-chinese-airlines-and-snapchats-biggest-problem-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/27/adam-goldstein-avoiding-chinese-airlines-and-snapchats-biggest-problem-vb-engage/#respondTue, 27 Sep 2016 14:32:12 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2065238Welcome to episode 21 of VB Engage, or, as we like to say — VB Engage 021 — because we are going to have hundreds of these things. So you’re just going to have to deal with it. In this episode, we talk to the cofounder of Hipmunk, Adam Goldstein, just days before the company’s […]
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Welcome to episode 21 of VB Engage, or, as we like to say — VB Engage 021 — because we are going to have hundreds of these things. So you’re just going to have to deal with it.

In this week’s weekly news segment, which happens every week, we discuss Snapchat for more than ten seconds.

Stewart spent part of last week at the first ever Snaphappen conference and awards ceremony (The Ghosties). There he discovered that his snaps are a bit dull, and he’s now feeling peer pressure from all the creative people out there creating epic snaps.

Announced this week at Snaphappen, a new analytics tool, called Snaplytics, has entered the fray. Did you see what they did with the name there? Clever. This tool is built to identify key metrics around snaps and Snapchat influencers. Brands will be able to pay for the analytics to see which influencers are most influential. Of course, keep in mind that just because someone is big on one platform doesn’t mean that they are influential on all platforms.

Travis may be big on Twitter and huge in China (no seriously — he is a large man) but just because he is an influencer on Twitter, doesn’t mean that anyone on YouTube cares about him. Not everyone treats every channel the same.

Snaplytics is currently limited to helping brands find the best influencers on Snapchat, and one of the best tools for finding Twitter influencers is probably Little Bird. Coincidentally, the CEO of Little Bird, Marshall Kirkpatrick, is on with us next week.

We then tease the news that Stewart is heading out to New York City for Advertising Week — or AdWeek, if you’re cool — so get ready for next week’s episode when we find out what is happening in the advertising technology world.

Finally, we talk about how smartphones are affecting retail purchases. Did you know that 70 percent of in-store purchases are driven by online research? It’s amazing how many people are making informed decisions these days.

Customers use smartphones to do the research in stores, though many times, they go back to the desktop to actually buy the product. Some people do still buy products in actual stores, but those people are dorks. Or impatient. Which reminds us, right around the corner, we’ll be seeing Black Friday advertising.

As this week’s main course, we have our interview with Adam Goldstein, the CEO and cofounder of Hipmunk, that cool airfare tool with the cute chipmunk logo.

What’s interesting about the airline travel industry is that the number of parameters involved makes creating a conversational chatbot a big challenge. Factoring in the time of day, destination, prices that change constantly, and other variables, you need a lot of machine learning power.

Hipmunk successfully launched a chatbot that, unlike some, is 100 percent A.I.-driven. The company has released this bot on a multitude of platforms, including Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, and others.

Goldstein tells us that instead of hiring a bunch of humans to answer all of these travel questions, Hipmunk hired people to train the chatbots.

And what kind of questions does a chatbot answer? Goldstein describes one request he saw: “I want to fly from San Francisco to Taipei sometime in October. And I want to travel for five days, and I want to see the cheapest fares in coach and business class, and I want to avoid flying on a Chinese airline.”

That was when Goldstein knew his team would have to upgrade their natural language processing, machine learning, and A.I. Goldstein tells us how Hipmunk managed to crack such a thorny problem.

We also ask a few general travel questions, and Goldstein doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings when he explains exactly what type of airfare you should avoid.

Tune in next week for our interview with former tech journalist-turned-entrepreneur, Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird.

Subscribe. Rate. Review. Call your Mother. (She misses you.)

Thanks to our sponsor MailChimp for helping to make VB Engage possible.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/27/adam-goldstein-avoiding-chinese-airlines-and-snapchats-biggest-problem-vb-engage/feed/02065238Adam Goldstein, avoiding Chinese airlines, and Snapchat’s biggest problem – VB Engage\n Nimble launches version 4.0 to fix customer relationship management’s biggest issuehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/nimble-launches-version-4-0-to-fix-customer-relationship-managements-biggest-issue/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/nimble-launches-version-4-0-to-fix-customer-relationship-managements-biggest-issue/#respondWed, 21 Sep 2016 10:00:51 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2059297EXCLUSIVE: The common customer relationship manager, or CRM, has been the bane of most salespeople’s lives since its inception. And traditional CRM solutions are increasingly out of place in today’s mobile, social environment. Today, Nimble is launching a major overhaul of its social CRM solution, in an attempt to drag the industry kicking and screaming into the 21st […]
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EXCLUSIVE:

The common customer relationship manager, or CRM, has been the bane of most salespeople’s lives since its inception.

And traditional CRM solutions are increasingly out of place in today’s mobile, social environment.

Today, Nimble is launching a major overhaul of its social CRM solution, in an attempt to drag the industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, where the smartphone dominates everything and sales is more than ever about building real relationships.

Version 4.0 of Nimble brings social profiles, sales information, and marketing data into Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, allowing you to automatically create, segment, reach out to, and engage with both prospects and existing customers.

Contacts and companies are enriched within your email platform and elsewhere on the web, such as when you’re viewing a LinkedIn profile, a news story, or a Facebook page. Most importantly, it solves the biggest issue with CRM solutions, the reason salespeople hate them so much.

Data entry.

Because Nimble 4.0 instantly maps contacts to enriched data from social networks and third-party databases, you always have the latest contact information on hand. Company insights are also added automatically, including industry, size, location, employee count, revenue, and more. Nimble keeps all these contact details constantly up-­to-­date.

And it offers direct imports from anywhere. It knows if you’re in Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, or a news article that focuses on a contact, and it allows you to pull in data with a single click. That includes importing multiple contacts from Twitter lists.

As with everything in life, the rise of mobile has changed the sales game.

“Our Nimble Smart Contacts Mobile apps powers social selling relationships on the go by combining a phone’s contacts and calendars with our rich Nimble people and company insights,” Jon Ferrara, CEO at Nimble and cofounder of the original CRM, GoldMine, told me. “Before every meeting, Nimble’s mobile app provides a detailed dossier with contact and company insights on who you’re meeting with. Our mobile apps even remind you to follow up and follow through with your contacts via automated reminders to log notes, tasks, and deals.”

Of course, complex sales environments require multiple contacts in differing but connected roles. How does Nimble help you organize communications in a complex sale?

“Relationships are messy, and we are all over-connected and over-communicated,” Ferrara said. “The legacy enterprise platforms being used today for sales, marketing, and social are siloed, and they don’t integrate into the places our teams engage customers. They are not designed to cross departments, let alone communication channels. Conversations start on Twitter, shift to LinkedIn, then email and calendar, and finally, if you’re doing it right, get into Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. The power of Nimble is how it elegantly manages and empowers team communications and collaboration between a company’s team and its prospects/customers/influencers across all channels and in all places.”

Of course, pure B2B sales organizations will benefit from tools like Nimble, which competes with a vast array of CRM, contact database, and contact enrichment solutions, but which benefits from being able to augment contact data directly within your email client or while you’re browsing.

And outside of that environment, Ferrara believes Nimble 4.0 can offer useful information across many roles and business types.

“Nimble powers human-to-human relationships that drive personal and business success,” Ferrara said. “It’s not just sales people who need help with this, everyone does. I believe that everyone in a successful company communicates with the community of people outside the company required to help it grow. This includes prospects, customers, editors, analysts, bloggers, investors, advisors, integration partners, resellers, and more.”

In addition to contact augmentation, Nimble 4.0 provides email tracking, group email messaging, email templates, and analytics to help you create engaging content and then assess how well it is performing.

Nimble 4.0 is available from today. New customers receive a 14-day free trial, after which accounts are priced at $25 per user, per month. It works with Google Apps, Outlook, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Hootsuite, iOS, and Android.

Speaking of mobile payments, Facebook announced this week that it will be accepting payments via Facebook Messenger, and — get this — it will not be taking any percentage of the fee. For free. No cost. Facebook is going to accept payments, and it won’t cost merchants anything, aside from whatever the payment partner company will be taking.

This is most likely a play to open up the floodgates, get a bunch of merchants on the platform, and then start charging down the road. It seems like the same strategy that the social behemoth put in place to get businesses over to Facebook in the first place.

The change has made Instagram ads more visible — with a highly visible call to action if you’ve been sitting on the image for 4 seconds. Also, video ads will open up to a landing page experience.

It’s very simple to create ads for Instagram, as Facebook owns it. You can access and create ads within the Facebook Power Editor. If you set up the ad within FB, with the right dimensions, it can automatically be activated in Instagram. The call to action you use on your Facebook ads will be the one used in Instagram — that is, unless you set up Instagram-only campaigns.

We also tease a future competition in this week’s episode. Huawei recently flew Travis to China to meet the company, and Travis being Travis, he bagged some impressive devices to give out to our audience. Look for more details in upcoming weeks. If you’ve listened to a few of our episodes, you’ll have a much greater chance of winning.

People are increasingly distrustful of anything that comes from a company, brand, or even the CEO. However, they do trust employees of the enterprise, and they want to hear from people in a similar situation to their own.

Mark explains that net promoter questions and surveys are good at surfacing customer advocates. Who is generating a lot of value for them? Clients who are happy with you are great people to add to your VIP customer advocate programs.

Influitive uses an internal VIP portal that resembles a Pinterest board and provides various opportunities for customers to engage with other clients. Maybe they can speak on stage with them, or they can help write a blog post or meet other customer advocates.

If you just ask people to do something, that doesn’t usually work all that well. You need to supply additional features to increase loyalty. Randomness and fun works, but you must actually engage and gamify your VIP customer advocacy experience, Mark says.

Having a great customer advocacy platform can help your advocates tell their story better. They get better over time. And you can help them and train them to tell better stories. It is a very engaging process and builds your company.

Thank you for tuning into episode 20 of VB Engage. Tune in next week for episode 21 with the CEO of Hipmunk, Adam Goldstein, who just sold the travel app company to Concur. It’s a great interview, and a timely one.

As always, if you’ve enjoyed this content, give it a subscribe, rating, or review on your favorite podcast platform. Come on, Stewart needs a virtual hug.

Thanks to our sponsor MailChimp for helping to make VB Engage possible.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/20/mark-organ-bad-kardashians-and-the-benevolence-of-facebook-vb-engage/feed/02059390Mark Organ, bad Kardashians, and the benevolence of Facebook – VB Engage\n Optimizely X launches so marketers can experiment everywhere, including TVhttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/15/optimizely-x-launches-so-marketers-can-experiment-everywhere-including-tv/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/15/optimizely-x-launches-so-marketers-can-experiment-everywhere-including-tv/#respondThu, 15 Sep 2016 14:00:19 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2055396Conversion optimization tools are critical to the success of modern businesses. When I wrote my 18,000-word in-depth study about this segment of marketing technology, the average return on investment — across almost 3,000 practitioners — was almost 224 percent. But to get the most from conversion rate optimization (CRO), you need to move beyond standard desktop and […]
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Conversion optimization tools are critical to the success of modern businesses. When I wrote my 18,000-word in-depth study about this segment of marketing technology, the average return on investment — across almost 3,000 practitioners — was almost 224 percent.

But to get the most from conversion rate optimization (CRO), you need to move beyond standard desktop and mobile web conversion rate testing. And personalization — which is closely related to optimization — needs to be on your radar too.

Optimizely announced the launch of Optimizely X today at its annual user conference, Opticon 2016, in San Francisco. In a move that takes the company beyond website testing, Optimizely X allows experiments and personalized marketing across any platform, device, or channel.

Optimizely X is essentially a testing and personalization platform that includes a suite of connected modules. These allow marketers, product managers, and any customer-facing stakeholder to create hypotheses, test assumptions, find winning combinations, customize the user experience, and ultimately increase revenues, retention, and relevance.

“It is a single, unified experimentation platform,” Linda Crawford, chief customer officer at Optimizely, told me. “By bringing marketing, product, and engineering experiments together on a single platform, companies can now optimize the customer experience across every touch point, every channel, and every device. With real-time results, powered by the Stats Engine, it’s easy to see results across different experiments.”

Optimizely X Mobile allows optimization of apps built on iOS and Android, with the ability to instantly roll out new features without waiting for App Store or Google Play review. And Optimizely X OTT is a brand new offering that enables experiments in any over-the-top (OTT) TV application using tvOS or Android TV. Experiments are possible in areas such as navigation, app layout, site design, featured content, or integrated message testing.

When it comes to implementation and the required resources, each module has different requirements. However, the company has clearly learned lessons from the simple install process used in its web optimization tools.

“Using Optimizely X Full Stack or Optimizely X OTT, companies can start testing immediately,” Crawford said. “A single developer can create and run a server-side experiment in minutes. In addition to freeing up valuable development resources, companies can now experiment with different sorts of algorithms, pricing, and new product features, and see the results in days or even hours, before deciding to roll out major changes.”

All of this bodes well for the future of conversion and customer experience optimization, which is a keystone in any modern marketing and product development strategy.

“It’s not enough for marketers to experiment on the web and mobile,” Crawford said. “We now engage with brands on multiple devices every day, not just from a computer or mobile phone, but through apps on the TV, video game consoles, and smart watches. Brands and businesses need to experiment everywhere to stay connected with their customers.”

In our study of conversion tools, we noted that the average “stack” of conversion products contains — on average — five different solutions. In the world of CRO, there are almost no vendors that provide a single, one-stop-shop for everything you’ll want to test and measure. Optimizely X is a serious step in that direction.

“We’re providing the ability to experiment from beginning to end,” Crawford said. “Now your marketing teams, product teams, and developers can experiment across the entire customer life cycle, deep into your technology stack and broadly across every channel and device.”

The suite also opens up the opportunity to test more than textual or graphic experiments.

“Developers can now experiment on the full stack of the product or customer life cycle on things such as the order of search results, pricing changes, or site redesigns,” Crawford said. “This also integrates with our Stats Engine to help businesses make smarter, more informed real-time decisions on the success of their experiments.”

So what’s next for Optimizely X? Crawford was quick to add that this initial set of tools is only the starting point.

“This is just the beginning, as we plan on expanding our feature set and adding support for more languages,” she said.

Apparently, Optimizely is moving beyond mid-sized and large businesses with these new tools and is now targeting enterprises and those with multi-channel marketing requirements. Optimizely X is available from October 4, 2016, with prices starting at $999 per month.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/15/optimizely-x-launches-so-marketers-can-experiment-everywhere-including-tv/feed/02055396Optimizely X launches so marketers can experiment everywhere, including TVAlain Falys, VR jump-scares, and Apple’s show of courage – VB Engagehttp://venturebeat.com/2016/09/13/alain-falys-vr-jump-scares-and-apples-show-of-courage-vb-engage/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/13/alain-falys-vr-jump-scares-and-apples-show-of-courage-vb-engage/#respondTue, 13 Sep 2016 15:12:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2053330This episode of VB Engage is revolutionary. The most advanced podcast in the history of podcasts. In fact, this week Mr. Rogers and Mr. Wright record the news segment of this show from their respective home cities. That almost never happens. It’s as if someone removed the travel adaptor from our lives. And we have […]
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This episode of VB Engage is revolutionary. The most advanced podcast in the history of podcasts. In fact, this week Mr. Rogers and Mr. Wright record the news segment of this show from their respective home cities. That almost never happens.

It’s as if someone removed the travel adaptor from our lives.

And we have an excellent conversation with Alain Falys, CEO of Yoyo Wallet, in which we discuss mobile payments. But first, the news.

We dissect Apple’s announcements, including how we feel about the new iPhone 7. There has been a lot of hubbub around the launch. Apparently, headphone jacks are a thing of the past, people, so it is time to throw away all your old wired ear-speakers.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the new iPhone, but it seems that Apple’s penchant for innovation over the years has waned, and we are doomed to receive slight iterations. Apple’s iOS is behind Android in a lot of areas, and many of the advancements on iPhone devices trap people into the Apple ecosystem. Sony learned, a long time ago, that proprietary connections can be the death of your business. Will Apple learn the same lesson?

And the trailer is not only a great experience itself, it also marks an impressive milestone in VR’s ability to power immersive advertising experiences on mobile devices without alienating the audience.

As noted earlier, this week’s interview is with Alain Falys, founder and CEO of Yoyo Wallet.

Stewart starts out by asking Alain what it is going to take to get us to drop our wallets and start using our mobile devices for payments.

When mobile payments offer much more than payment — offer the full consumer engagement personalized payment platform. Not just payments, but loyalty and rewards. – Alain Falys

In a recent study, 67 percent of US respondents and 58 percent of UK respondents say they’d visit a store if they received a coupon reminder when they were within proximity of that store. Personalized relevant messages can be very useful in converting mobile users into in-store sales.

If you pay with a tool like Yoyo Wallet, your personal preferences are readily known. The mobile payment system enables the extraction of the most valuable data — the transaction data tied to the person making the purchase.

Once you know what someone has bought in the past, for example, you can customize future offers to that user. It’s all about customer experience. People like that idea of gaining rewards, checking points in an app, and viewing offers.

We know people like seamless transactions. However, not many people are using mobile payment solutions yet. Less than five percent of iPhone 6 users are using Apple Pay whenever they can.

Turns out retailers are the ones that have to innovate. Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay don’t give you much in the way of any additional information or reward opportunities.

Bottom line: The standard payment solutions don’t enable retailers to sell more — they just offer users an alternate way to pay. Retailers need to have an actual loyalty plan and the right mobile payment solution, according to Falys.

This is a fascinating interview. Alain is a brilliant mind in this mobile payments space, and in mobile engagement and communities, in general. You’ll be glad you took the time.

If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to check that out. We had a great conversation with Jonathan Abrams, former founder and CEO of Friendster and current CEO of content curation app Nuzzel.

Tune in next week for our interview with Mark Organ, the CEO of Influitive. We’ll be chatting about how to engage your employees and how to get the best advocates to help build and inform your community.

If you like the show, please rate and review it. You should do that with things you like, you know. Feedback is good. It’s a little reward that goes a long way. It helps us feel connected to you — much like plugging in a set of headphones.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/13/alain-falys-vr-jump-scares-and-apples-show-of-courage-vb-engage/feed/02053330Alain Falys, VR jump-scares, and Apple’s show of courage – VB Engage\n Take it from Gilt and Zillow: It’s not the size of your user base, it’s how you use it (VB Live)http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/08/take-it-from-gilt-and-zillow-its-not-the-size-of-your-user-base-its-how-you-use-it-vb-live/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/08/take-it-from-gilt-and-zillow-its-not-the-size-of-your-user-base-its-how-you-use-it-vb-live/#respondThu, 08 Sep 2016 11:10:28 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=2048458VB LIVE: It’s time to ditch the “any install at lowest cost” theory of user acquisition. Join leading marketing minds from mobile app powerhouses Gilt and Zillow as they reveal why high-value users should be your real target — and how to acquire them the right way. Access this VB Live event on demand right here. “There’s […]
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VB LIVE:

It’s time to ditch the “any install at lowest cost” theory of user acquisition. Join leading marketing minds from mobile app powerhouses Gilt and Zillow as they reveal why high-value users should be your real target — and how to acquire them the right way.

“There’s a lot of temptation out there as you grow your business and your brand to get a lot of new users or a lot of reengagement,” says Alexandra Press Maguire, digital marketing director of luxury ecommerce company Gilt Groupe. “But if they’re not taking the actions that are important to your business, it’s a waste. We want to be able to track and attribute users to those actions, and then we want to focus on those metrics.”

The first step in hunting down the users that mean the most to your bottom line, Maguire says, is understanding the metrics that actually define high-quality users for your specific business and product.

“It’s not just one thing,” agrees Ashley Blackmon, VP of marketing at Zillow Group, which houses a portfolio of real estate and home-related brands. “We want to understand our users, and we want to understand their behavior so we can find users who are like them. We want to understand what their affinities are, what their preferences are, so that we can be a part of the conversation in terms of what’s relevant to them, and we want to measure success over time.”

Finding quality users and identifying them takes not only analytics tools, measurement tools, and working with partners that provide metrics; it means having the patience to find them and track them, Blackmon explains. “It takes time,” she says. “It takes that patience to test and learn as you go.”

One of the major challenges in shifting your focus to finding users that offer long-term value isn’t just acquiring the necessary data but attributing it correctly, to gain real insight into what’s happening with your user cohorts, and where the value arises.

“It becomes critical to have very detailed infrastructure for reporting in place so we can measure all down-funnel events possible and really optimize to the maximum possible level,” Maguire says. “Without that infrastructure in place, it’s really challenging for us to convert customers as opposed to just installers.”

Dave Myers, COO and founder of mParticle, urges companies to focus on building the necessary foundation. “There is a common theme around the challenge, and that is investment,” says Myers. Not only does it require that investment in time that Blackmon advocates for, it requires investment in analytics: “Both tools as well as the talent,” he explains. “Investment in personalization, and then investing in systems of engagement where you can actually engage and nurture those high-value users.”

That circumvents the temptation to paint a broad brushstroke across a cohort of users and label them all high LTV — when the reality is that there are many subsegments and many cohorts, each of which requires specific targeting and personalization efforts.

“One of the most critical pieces to our success here at Gilt for our mobile app acquisition program, and really taking it to a level of driving customers as opposed to just installs on the actual device, is really based on our lifetime value model for our install cohorts,” Maguire says. “And these really need to be customized obviously over time as businesses change, as seasonality changes. So we are looking at our retention curves constantly, both historic as well as at the close of each new cohort.”

It’s a particularly important piece to help fuel paid marketing in your install economy, to not only ensure that you have the right media mix in place, but you’re also as efficient as possible with your spend. And again, this goes back to having the analytics in place to drill down into what is happening not only inside your app, but in relation to your app.

“As marketers get increasingly sophisticated, we’re starting to see them bring in additional sources of data to refine their tests and experimentation,” says Myers. “Rather than just relying on data capture within the app, they’re bringing back push interaction data and email data and maybe even enriching their data with third-party data.”

In the end, Blackmon says, it’s making sure you’re not relying on one trick to get users. “We invest in learning,” she explains. “I would encourage everyone who’s thinking about really getting after a strong user acquisition program to encourage your team to really invest in testing and failing fast, rewarding successful tests as well as tests that don’t go so well, so that your full team is looking for new sources.”

To learn more about understanding the user journey, using data to inform personalization, and driving customers down the funnel to engagement and long-term use, catch up on our free VB Live event!

Learn the price app publishers are currently paying to acquire quality users across several categories

Review the top user acquisition platforms and why

Understand the role of timing in UA

Maximize organic installs of your mobile application

Speakers:

Dave Myers, COO and Co-Founder, mParticle

Ashley Blackmon, VP marketing, Zillow Group

Alexandra Press Maguire, Digital Marketing Director, Gilt Groupe

John Koetsier, Mobile Economist, TUNE

Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

This VB Live event is sponsored by mParticle.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/08/take-it-from-gilt-and-zillow-its-not-the-size-of-your-user-base-its-how-you-use-it-vb-live/feed/02048458Take it from Gilt and Zillow: It’s not the size of your user base, it’s how you use it (VB Live)